Erotic photography is a style of art photography of an erotic, sexually suggestive or sexually provocative nature. It is a type of erotic art.

In a spectrum, erotic photography is often distinguished from nude photography, which contains nude subjects not necessarily in erotic situations, and pornographic photography, which is of a sexually detailed nature. Pornographic photography generally moves in the direction of the "obscene", and is judged as lacking in artistic or aesthetic value; however, the line between art and pornography has been both socially and legally debated, and many photographers have created work that intentionally ignores these distinctions.

Erotic photographs are normally intended for commercial use, including mass-produced items such as decorative calendars, pinups and for men's magazines, such as Penthouse and Playboy, but many art photographers have also dabbled in detailed or erotic imagery. Additionally, sometimes erotic photographs are intended to be seen only by a subject's partner. Glamour photography is frequently erotic.

The subjects of erotic photographs include professional models, celebrities and amateurs. Well-known entertainers do not generally pose nude for photographs. The first entertainer to pose nude for photographs was the stage actress Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868). However, a number of well-known film stars have posed as pin-up models and been promoted in photography and other media as sex symbols. The majority of erotic photographs are of female subjects, but erotic images of men are also published.

There are no formal qualifications to model, but legal ages are required. The themes used in erotic photoshoots can be diverse, and it is up to the model and photographer to determine what the shoot will entail, so the model has to be aware of their limits.

Before 1839, depictions of nudity and erotica generally consisted of paintings, drawings and engravings. In that year, Louis Daguerre presented the first practical process of photography to the French Academy of Sciences. Unlike earlier photograph methods, his daguerreotypes had stunning quality and did not fade with time. Artists adopted the new technology as a new way to depict the nude form, which in practice was the feminine form. In so doing, at least initially, they tried to follow the styles and traditions of the art form. Traditionally, in France, an académie was a nude study done by a painter to master the female (or male) form. Each had to be registered with the French government and approved or they could not be sold. Soon, nude photographs were being registered as académie and marketed as aids to painters. However, the realism of a photograph as opposed to the idealism of a painting made many of these intrinsically erotic.

In Nude Photography, 1840–1920, Peter Marshall notes: "In the prevailing moral climate at the time of the invention of photography, the only officially sanctioned photography of the body was for the production of artist's studies. Many of the surviving examples of daguerreotypes are clearly not in this genre but have a sensuality that clearly implies they were designed as erotic or pornographic images".

The daguerreotypes were not without drawbacks, however. The main difficulty was that they could only be reproduced by photographing the original picture since each image was an original and the all-metal process does not use negatives. In addition, the earliest daguerreotypes had exposure times ranging from three to fifteen minutes, making them somewhat impractical for portraiture. Unlike earlier drawings, action could not be shown. The poses that the models struck had to be held very still for a long time. Another limitation was the monochrome image that the technology could produce. Because of this, the standard pornographic image shifted from one of two or more people engaged in sex acts to a solitary woman exposing her genitals. The cost of the process also limited the spread of the technology. Since one picture could cost a week's salary, the audience for nudes mostly consisted of artists and the upper echelon of society.