Naked Thought

The naked man in my hotel room climbed up onto the stuffed chair and looked out at the clock tower we could see in the distance.

“That’s perfect,” I said. “You look like a sculpture.”

“I had Rodin in mind,” he said. The thinker pose fit his personality: I’d only known him for less than 48 hours, but already I’d noticed that he was someone who listened closely, made careful observations, and thought deeply about topics before speaking up in a conversation.

I snapped a few photos of his silhouette and then looked again through my viewfinder. Wait, something was weird about that silhouette.

“You didn’t take your socks off!”

He looked back over his shoulder and then down at his feet. “Oh, I didn’t think you’d see my feet.”

“You have to be totally naked,” I explained. “That’s part of the experience.” So he reached down and obligingly stripped off the socks, then settled back to tell me the story about the tattoo on his shoulder. 

Yes, the naked photo tradition has continued. My conference friends have gotten used the tradition. When I bumped into Vegetarian Guy With Cool Tattoos in the elevator between sessions, the first thing he asked was, "Have you found a victim yet?" 

This conference was interdisciplinary — a mix of scientists, artists, writers, and literature professors — and almost all of my colleagues had something to say about the naked photo project. (Yes, somehow it has become a “project.”) We’ve all studied the body in some way, whether we’ve sketched it, or learned anatomy, or looked at sexual symbolism in literature. In fact, the art show at the museum where some of the sessions were held included interactive exhibits in which the viewer’s body became part of the artwork she was viewing.

One thing I’ve discovered through this project is that everyone has stories about their body. Ask a naked man about his tattoo, and he’ll tell you what was happening when he got that tattoo, often when he was at a transformational stage of his life. Ask a woman about the scar on her belly, and you’ll hear a story. That’s still the valuable part of this project: not the photographs, but the stories that people tell me when we talk about the project. The stories don’t end up on my blog because they aren’t my stories to tell.

On Saturday night, conference attendees gathered for a dance. After three days of intent discussions and serious presentations, it’s always fun to watch everyone strip off their blazers and gyrate to the music. As I looked around the room of sweaty conference folks, I thought not about the intellectual ideas they’d brought to the conference, typed into laptops or scribbled onto yellow pads of paper, but the stories written onto their bodies.

(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 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. )