Anonymous

 

Anonymous nudes are something I’m invited to do from time to time and it's a genre I enjoy. Some customers have come from an internationally published background, others are in other trades/professions, where revealing their identity would be inappropriate, or potentially damage people’s perception of them, or their business.  

That aside, it’s a great way of being creative with the human form and sometimes, being very bold, stopping short of gratuitous. Angles, lighting, and aperture are pivotal. As are trust, comfort, and good, clear communication between the parties. I took these in her home using a mixture of natural light and on-camera flash with diffuser. Props are another consideration. My Fed2 rangefinder film camera, Tibetan Singing Bowl, and toy motorcycle. The model chose her pinwheel, bear claw, chain, and scarf.

Bodyscapes & Broken Camera Bodies

Bodyscapes are something I do from time to time and often as a way of introducing something interesting/quirky to a fine art shoot. After all, even with a highly-skilled, imaginative model, there are a finite number of possible poses. 

The most obvious route, and one I often take is asking the model to bring along scarves, lingerie to mix things up. It’d been the best part of eight months since Venise and I last worked together but she was excited by the brief and moreover understood it very well.  

There are exceptions to every rule. However, any kind of nude project requires comfort and excellent rapport between model(s) and photographer(s). Not something I would consider with an inexperienced model-unless they’d been a life model or similar before. 

I’d bought the model motorcycles for pennies on a popular auction site for this project during lockdown and the Samsung NX300 body had been stuttering and stammering for a good while. Essentially a pretty paperweight, I liked the retro rangefinder styling and we both felt it a better fit, (metaphorically and literally) than my default Minolta SLR. 

My little pear tree bestowed some fruit this year, so we reasoned it rude not to deploy its gift.  I shot these from her bedroom using natural, my Sony A7, and 50mm 1.8 lens. Not to everyone’s tastes perhaps, but we were pleased with the results.