The Cupping Hand And Billowing Scarf...
I remember as a child standing in front of Michelangelo's David at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence and looking straight up into his balls and thinking absolutely nothing of it. It wasn't yuk, it wasn't ooh look, it wasn't poking my twin in the side and giggling with embarassment. It was just, oh wow, that's a big statue.
I grew up in Rome and my family traveled often to Turkey and Greece during the summers where we stayed in campgrounds and bathed most often in the public baths where everyone sat around naked in the warm mineral waters. As a kid it seemed like the most natural thing on earth because in fact, I never thought about it at all. It's just what we did.
My playmates where we lived in the countryside north of Rome were all Italian. We spent most of the time we weren't in school playing with them in the fields and wooded hills that surrounded our home; exploring the caves that had been dug into some of the hillsides during the war and making pretend fortresses in the heavy reeds along the streams. And sometimes when we played we got naked because I don't know why - we just sometimes got naked and played. I never gave it any thought. It's just what we did and there was no one telling us we couldn't or shouldn't.
So my consciousness surrounding nudity and sexuality was formed in an environment of openness and freedom and play. As we got older and sexual desire came into the picture we still played with the same freedom and comfort; the playtime just became more driven by the desire for orgasm. It wasn't until I moved to the States in my mid teens that I heard anybody say it was weird to touch the kids I played with because no one was saying it in Italy.
What's true for me at the most basic level that I can distill it all down to, is that I came of age in a world where the naked human body was a completely normal part of my daily life. And sometimes it was a beautiful thing, as when visiting the Sistine Chapel or looking up at David in Florence or reaching across the velvet rope to touch Paolina in the Borghese Gallery in Rome.
Over the years I've lived back and forth between there and here and in the process experienced and explored sexuality from a number of different vantage points. What has always been very clear to me is that when I'm Italy I feel free and when I come back to the States I feel burdened by so much naying and swaying and braying.
Most of my editorial nude work has been created with little thought other than to create images that I enjoy looking at. I've often wondered if I got into all of this because I was trying, at least subconsciously, to recreate the beauty and naturalness of the bodies I saw all around me growing up. I don't really know for sure. But I know that the intentional imposition of modesty into my imagery compromises my artistry and makes me uncomfortable.
I know that not everybody wants their genitals or their nipples showing and I respect that. But I want to see them because that's what's most beautiful and natural to me. The intentional or self-conscious covering of genitals is so distracting to me anymore that I have a difficult time getting beyond it. When I see a hand cupped on a dick or a scarf billowing only across a vulvic mound that's pretty much all I'm seeing in an image. I want my images to be free of those kinds of distractions. Not for you, for me because I'm the one who's going to see them the most.
I had a model I did nudes of for several years whose genitals never once appeared in a single frame I shot of him because he was heavily invested in making sure that not even the tip of his penis or a curve of his scrotum was visible to the camera. (Bizarre considering that his girlfriend, who I also photographed naked for many years, had no problem at all with complete nudity from any angle at any time.) It was a hassle keeping his stuff outta frame and it annoyed me but I played along because I liked the images we were creating together. I look at them now and of course see what nobody else sees, which is the tremendous amount of work it took to create genital-free imagery.
Those days are gone and today I'm only doing nudes that are free from the imposition of modesty. If the shot is otherwise graceful and fluid and it's really working for me, the presence or absence of genitals in that moment is inconsequential. It's the purposeful covering of genitals or nipples that doesn't work for me because then that is what the image is all about; the covering, the modesty, the fear, the cupping hand and billowing scarf that are serving no other purpose in that moment but to hide that which I really want to see.
What can I say, I like my nudes naked.
