It started as a joke.

I was working up North in a tourist trap town. One of the handsome young actors in the historic park I was working at had made his rounds, seducing several of the women, including me, within a few months. A newly spurned victim rounded us all up during a party and we all found out what a busy bee he’d been! He’d been sleeping with quite a variety, from nineteen to forty five years old, tall, petite, very round to very boyish…pick a body type, any type…his collection was commendable. We couldn’t resist giving him a toast for his good taste in women.

Someone suggested we all do a nude calendar: one girl for every month, to chronicle his conquests. Since there are only twelve months in the year, I’m afraid we couldn’t all fit in, but the idea of doing a nude photo session stayed with us. Once we decided to do it, however, we decided we weren’t going to do it for him, we were going to do it for us.

Taking Our Own Nude Portraits

On the afternoon of our first shoot, we stampeded out of the gold rush park, ripping off our costumes: bonnets, corsets, petticoats…pulling out our hairpins…and we giggled like school girls, zipping past fir trees, splashing naked into the freezing cold mountain lake for our first group picture.

I’ll never forget the timid beauty of some of the very young girls. Though they represented the most classic and “perfect” of forms, they were the hardest to photograph. Self judgment. They had no idea how stunning they were. They only worried about the ways they didn’t match up to the magazines. Some chickened out and refused to be photographed altogether.

Then the eldest in our crowd, well into her forties, sashayed past them, “Oh, I’ll go next” and slithered in and out of the water like a liquid Cleopatra, so comfortable and so lovely with her own body. Watching her naked in nature was one of the most sensual things I’ve ever experienced, and provided an instant lesson: so much about beauty is movement and so much about movement is self confidence.

Feeling Sexy In Our Own Skin

Next, my courageous pal who struggles with mental stability, stood on a raft, completely balanced: bare breasted and strong as an Amazon.

Italian Catholic girl me, who has a history of sexual abuse, laid out freely on the grass, totally nude, offering myself my own freedom again, the freedom to not feel ashamed.

A shy very round girl was finally convinced to pose fawnishly at the creek side, a toe delicately drifting in the water, as poetic as a Botticelli. We all gasped when we saw her. We knew we were witnessing the first time in her life that she ever felt beautiful.

A woman in her twenties with terminal cancer posed pale, nude and thin as a reed in a field of wild flowers. She stared straight into the camera, embracing her own frail little body. Her caption: “My vulnerability is my strength”.

We booked one of the galleries in town and presented the photographs as an art showing. The whole town turned out. It was one of the single most validating and empowering things I’ve ever done in my life.

The following year, the girl with cancer died and she used her picture at her memorial, the last image to remember her by.

How Nude Portraits Heal

I don’t know about you, but I can feel so inundated with images of women in the media: young, perfectly poised, air brushed, covered in make-up and surgically altered, that when I stare at myself in the mirror, in bad lighting, with no art director in sight, I can be very critical with myself. I also start to feel as though my naked image is only good for a cheap sell for sex, like the media portrays. I start to believe that my body is not for myself, but for someone else.

That photography session completely changed the way I view my body. In a way it was my acknowledgment and “thank you” to God for making me the way I was. Perhaps also it was a glimpse into how God may see me.

I recommend everyone, at least once in your life time, turn your body into a painting, a sculpture, a fine photograph. Remember who you are. You’re a work of art. And a fleeting work of art at that. Capture it while you can. Celebrate your existence.

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