What light

Usually when I post photos of naked women on my blog (and yes, that happens more often than you might think), people will chime in on the comments and say, “How come you only take pictures of beautiful people?”

The answer is, of course, is that there aren’t other types of people. I’ve never met a person who didn’t look beautiful to me.

Almost every woman who has posed on my blog has complained, at one time or another, about being too fat or too skinny, too tall or too short, too curvy or too flat-chested, too pale or too dark. As we’re setting up the shot, the woman will confide in me that she hates her legs, or her hips, or her hair. “I don’t even want to see myself naked,” she’ll say. But then we take a bunch of shots, I put them on my computer, and I delete the ones that didn’t come out well. Then we look together at the remaining shots.

That’s when the woman will say, in surprise. “Oh, I look so much better than I thought.”

That’s what I look about the naked photo tradition. Women get a chance to look at themselves the way I see them; they get to see that they’re beautiful.

Today’s photo is of my friend Quilt Artist. She’s recently started putting some of her creative energy into writing poetry, and we had planned a photo of her writing in her journal in the morning sunlight. But then she turned to look out the window, and I snapped a shot that we both liked.

(Readers who want to know the history of the naked photo tradition can check it out here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here .)