Naked Before God (And Everybody Else)

Don't walk close to the River of Shit.  If you fall in, nobody will jump to save you.  If you manage to save yourself, don't expect a lot of hugs when you reach shore.

I need to make this brief today.  The factory whistle is blowing.  They have me working the Shit River today.

I don't know who took this photograph.  That is the trouble with Tumblr and other blog groups.  They rarely give credit.  I'm giving credit here to whomever made this photograph.  1919.  More romantic than Bellocq in technique.  The lighting is subdued it seems, though if you look you can see the shadow the model is casting.  More directional is probably a better thing to say.  If I get a place to shoot with a big window. . . .

As the factory boss gets meaner, my hours become longer, so I am shooting later at night in the studio.  I shot last night and am exhausted this morning.  I am booking later and the model showed up even later than that.  She brought lots of costumes.

"I lied on my profile," she said.  "I'm thirty-seven, not twenty-seven."

She was "heavy-ish" and thought the costumes concealed it.  They didn't.  Everything made her look bigger.  She did not come to shoot naked.  Never had.  It is all O.K. with me.  Except for distress and sadness.  My studio is set up so that models are looking into a mirrored back wall, so they watch themselves as they move.  She worried much about it.  An hour after she arrived, we had taken five pictures.  Listen, I said, let's do this.  Take all of that off.  Look at that.  Aren't you something?

We shot a couple packs of Polaroids.

"I see what you mean," she said about the clothing.

She loved the pictures as I lay them on the table.

"They say the camera doesn't lie," I said.  "That's wrong.  The camera always lies.  We can make is say whatever we want.  That's the beauty of it."

She was very excited when we finished shooting.  Her boyfriend is an artist, she said, he and his friends. Well, tattoo artists.  But they are having a big art show at a gallery.  She named it.  There would be work from all over the country, she said.  She thought that I should have something in it.  I don't care to show locally much, but I pointed to one of the 32"x26" framed pieces on the wall.

"I'll do one that size of you if they want it.  One without the costumes."

She was very happy about that.

And that's the secret of it, I guess.  I try to figure it out all the time, but that's it.  People are beautiful and they want to be seen.  Maybe we all want to stand naked in front of the world and be applauded just so.  But we fear we will be laughed at and jeered.  It is true, but it shouldn't be.

As a male friend of mine said about skinny dipping, "It's always hard to show the world your shortcomings."

Amen.