Black's Beach Nude
This remains one of my all-time favorite images even though it was taken over twenty years ago. I don't remember the guy's name but I vividly remember the warm summer day when I photographed him and his friends at Black's Beach.
There were four or five of us who'd been hanging out together in Laguna Beach. They lived there and I was taking some classes at the Laguna Beach School of Art and somehow we hooked up and became friends. One day we decided to pile in my pickup and drive down to the famous nude beach that sits at the bottom of the cliffs below UCSD in La Jolla.
This was my first time going to a nude beach and I had no idea what to expect. I kept my shorts on at first even though the rest of the guys were naked from about the time they hit the sand. It didn't take long though for my shorts to disappear and my inhibitions along with them.
In the background here you can see the rusted remains of a car that somebody had pushed off the steep cliffs that rose several hundred feet above the beach. I'd already done a lot of pictures of the guy you see here in the weeks previous. He was wildly free with his body and loved being naked, even when we weren't on the nude beach.
I wasn't really posing him as much as just following him around with my camera while he was playing with his friends in the sand and swimming in the ocean. At one point he threw himself down in the sand in front of the wrecked car and started to roll. The sand stuck to parts of him and not to others, creating a beautiful patchwork of colors on his body that reflected both the reds of the car and the whites of the sand.
I snapped this shot while lying naked on my belly in the sand.
Everything about this image speaks to me - I love the graceful way his hand is lying in the sand just beneath his butt and the long relaxed lines of his body. I love the way the colors behind him and the colors in front of him all come together on his skin. And I love that he's naked and free and having a wonderful time at the beach. And I especially love that the book of matches in the foreground are from the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach where we all went dancing after we left the beach that evening. I didn't put those matches there - they just happened to be there when I took the picture.
This guy was the first person I'd ever photographed naked and I think in a way he kind of set the standard for all others that would follow. He so loved his body and was so free and happy with it and himself and he so much enjoyed getting naked that photographing him became something of an epiphanal experience for me. I knew from that fun-filled day on the beach taking these pictures that this was something I wanted to keep doing.
And have.
