hi, i’m forrest!

I take pictures of naked people.

The art historian Kenneth Clark draws a distinction between nakedness and nudity. The nude, he says, is a genre of art, replete with conventions and periods and historical evolutions. It has been elevated by Serious Thought and Serious Study by Serious People. Nakedness, by contrast, is embarrassing, “huddled and defenseless,” “shapeless, pitiful.”  To see human nakedness is to be “disturbed by wrinkles, pouches, and small imperfections.”  In real life “every detail of the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.”

He’s both right and very wrong. He’s right that art is historically misleading about what bodies look like (try to find a vulva painted or sculpted before 1868; I’ll wait). He’s right that we’re imperfect, and that clothes are armor we wear to hide our imperfections. He’s wrong that imperfections are embarrassing, and he’s wrong that our bodies need to be idealized to be worthy of being seen as art. 

I take pictures of naked people.

In the area of rural Alaska where I grew up nakedness wasn’t taboo and wasn’t sexualized. Mixed genders and generations swam naked together in summer lakes and bathed together in saunas. The first direct art influence I recall is Matisse’s The Dance: a joyous group of naked people joining hands and frolicking together outdoors. The first indirect influence I recall is a naked Greek sculpture at the Art Institute in Chicago. I was six or seven. My grandma, who was a docent, took me on a tour of the museum. I was bored, unmoved by the abstractions of the Picassos or the hallucinatory colors of the van Goghs. But the room with the Greek and Roman marble sculptures shattered my mind and reshaped my understanding of what art could be. The sculptures looked so familiar in their finely muscled ease, like my parents and my older brothers and the mountain climbers who’d jump scruffy and sunburnt into the Susitna river after coming off Denali. They looked human and alive. They weren’t doing anything to be art. They just existed. 

When I take pictures I try to create a space where the people I’m working with can just exist. I don’t tell them how to stand and I don't pose them. Partly this is because I’m a white guy with a camera and we’re traditionally pretty awful. I don’t ever want there to be the concern than I’m posing someone for my own pleasure or in a way that makes them uncomfortable. But, more than that, it’s because people are endlessly creative and resourceful and move more beautifully than I could ever direct. So I just tell them to remember to breathe, to not think about what they look like, to follow whatever impulse comes up. If they’re visibly tense I tell them to shake out their whole body like they’re inflatable tube people outside a car dealership or to put their hands on their skin and run them back and forth until the tangibility of their own bodies has pulled them out of their heads. I tell stories about the weird wonderful shit I’ve seen in past shoots to remind them that however weird they think they are they aren’t. Or — better — that they are weird but so is everyone else, and that our collective weirdness is the precious magic that makes us human. 

Sometimes in shoots people cry. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they masturbate while their cat watches. A couple once made pancakes together, naked, and then sat on the couch and ate them. Sometimes the people I work with pretend I’m not there and sometimes they talk to me so much I have to crop their heads out of the photos. A contortionist, upon hearing my warning that his anus was front and center in a shot, once snapped at me that the butthole was the center of the body, it’s sacred, take the photo. 

The first great poem written in an English that we would recognize today is called the Canterbury Tales. Its poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, structured it as a collection of stories told by a disparate group of people to pass the time on a journey. It’s a mishmash of genres and tones. There are lyrical descriptions of springtime and there are fart jokes, religious allegory and get-it-banned-from-schools sex. There are adventure stories and love stories and comedies and tragedies and whatever else you can think of, all put into the mouths of characters so earthily human you can smell them. The glory of the poem is that Chaucer treats everything with the same weight. Nothing is unworthy of poetry. We all eat and we all shit and we all fuck and we all pray in some way and we all find beauty in the sunrise and we all want to fall in love and to take any of that away makes us less than human. It is nakedness as art. 

Chaucer presents himself not as a storyteller but as the organizer of stories told by unique individuals. I try to do that, too. The people who choose to work with me have as much influence over our photos as I do. I hate the idea of a muse, a passive vessel (too often female) shaped by an artist (too often male) to bring his vision to life. I want to make art with co-creators, not muses. I want to make art with creative weirdos of all genders, all sexualities, all body types, with anyone and everyone who wants to make art with me. 

I don’t create photographs of nude muses. I take pictures of naked people.