In 1977, Madonna Louise Ciccone was a 19-year-old dance student at the University of Michigan, earning extra money the way many art students did — by posing for photographers and art classes. She was paid $10 an hour. The photographer was Herman Kulkens. The sessions produced a series of images that would sit largely unseen for years before surfacing publicly in the 1980s.
The photographs show a young woman who looks exactly like what she was — a teenager with no famous name, no record deal, and no public persona yet constructed. She is brunette in the images, slim from years of serious dance training, and visibly comfortable in front of the camera in a way that suggests she had already done this kind of work before. She poses in various costumes across the sessions — hats, a man’s dress shirt, a loosely knotted tie. Some frames are partially clothed. Others are fully nude.
Posing for art classes and photographers was standard practice for students who needed income and had no issue with the work. Madonna needed the money and took the job without apparent hesitation. There was nothing unusual about the arrangement in an art school environment.
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The photographs stayed out of public circulation through the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time Madonna moved to New York, built her career from scratch, and became one of the most famous performers in the world. When Playboy and Penthouse published some of the Kulkens images in 1985, Madonna had already released her debut album and was in the middle of recording Like a Virgin.
Her response to the publications was characteristically direct. She expressed no shame about the photographs and said publicly that she had nothing to apologize for. The images captured a 19-year-old doing a legitimate job for legitimate pay, and she stood by that position without qualification.
The majority of the photographs from those 1977 sessions were never published by either magazine and remained privately held for decades.
