Nekkid Pitchures

My favourite dress is long-sleeved, loose-fitting and goes down to my ankles. It would pass muster in an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood. Out of all the outfits I own, it's the one dress that I've had the most compliments on from guy friends. It's enough to show off some curves, but also enough to leave something to the imagination.

I was at Barnes and Noble looking through periodicals on fine art photography and I noticed that a few of the magazines had an inordinate amount of nude women. Of course it wasn't the Playboy/Hustler type of nude--these were "serious" nude photos. The type of black and white photos that look like CK One ads with uber-serious young women looking mightily unhappy (binging and purging tends to have that effect on people) and writhing around on the furniture in various stages of undress.

Now, I'm not a big fan of nudity in photos, but it's not for the reasons you might assume. I have several reasons and obscenity isn't one of them.

1. The periodicals I saw seemed to focus on wanting to be on the "cutting edge". The message; if you want to be taken seriously, naked is the way to go and if you question the wisdom in that, then you are obviously a Flyover-State yokel and not an urbane New Yorker where people actually have a modicum of class and taste. I'm not buying it.

2. What is the purpose of a portrait? Isn't it to capture the essence of who somebody is on film? How can one see the whole person when the only thing catching the beholder's eye is an enormous set of jugs? A whole person is made up of more than just two items up front.

3. It's a substitute for real creativity. Anybody can draw a crowd taking nude photos, because people aren't interested in your work as an artist--they're interested in seeing naked women. Abercrombie and Fitch came up with the concept that they would promote their clothing by having the models in their quarterlies not wear any (or hardly any). That isn't creativity--it's using sex to sell a product. Hardly a novel idea and it certainly doesn't make them edgy.

4. There are a lot more photos of naked women then naked men.

I'm not saying that every nude photo is pretentious, stagnant, and base. There are photos that are well-composed and capture the whole person and while the models are nude, most of those photos don't bare all. One of the most beautiful photos I saw was of a woman who while stripped down to her birthday suit was in a position so that she didn't show any of the goodies. What you do see is her striking eyes--you see her, not her boobs.

The most beautiful women are the ones that you can actually see.