As a younger traveler, I’d march through the airport draped in rags held together with chains, safety-pins, and bits of shredded patriotism. Like gutter royalty I wore a crown of multicolored dreadlocks spiking in every direction. Upon my shoulders hung all the weight of the world in a pack with an upside-down American flag on it. Yes, I took a certain amount of pride in looking like the homeless child of a drug-addicted parrot and a second-hand motorcycle. I’m now too old to remember why, but when we were young we tried to wear as much of our identities on our outer shells as we could. If we didn’t, we ran the risk of being a ‘sell out.’ I suspect this, ‘selling out’ is an alien concept to my younger readers, and one I don’t know where to begin to explain – so just know that at the end of the last century it was a cardinal sin. Needless to say, one of the costs of this integrity was getting ‘randomly selected for further screening’ more times than statistics would suggest possible.
Today I am older, wiser, and have far fewer fun options for my thinning hair. Not to mention I’m in a longterm, committed (polyamorous) relationship, so I no longer need the complimentary body cavity searches. So unless traveling by courier-flight or container-ship I do my best to dress in the costume of a fine, upstanding, nonthreatening, and definitely not smuggling anything, tourist.
We don’t need scientific studies to tell us that how we dress changes the way people see and think about us. Hell, we know how judgy we are and can only assume that everyone else has got to be worse. Every time we’re out in public our heads are full of, “That person looks cool.” “That one must be a cop.” “I wonder what I can score off that one?” We’re human and it’s just part of how we make sense of the world. The only problem is, it’s a shitty system. Nowadays we’re focusing more and more on what covers our bodies rather then the body’s language itself. With a little make-over people can get us to believe just about anything they want about them. And as much as we might not want to admit it, on some level, we know this to be true – and we use it all the time
Every time we pick out clothes; if we choose to wear a black top and black bottom, or wear shorts instead of trousers, hair up or down, glasses or contacts, we have, in the back of our minds, what we suspect our friends and strangers will think about that. Yes, even if we say, ‘fuck it’ and choose the uniform of someone who’s trying to send the message that they don’t give a shit about the way they look.
So much of our identities are tied up in the cloth we wrap around ourselves it can be hard to acknowledge that we often dress for the reactions of others. Sometimes we want attention, or to please. Other times it’s to blend in, or be intimidating enough to be left alone. But it’s all the same thing. Everything we wear is a costume, uniform, disguise, or mask. The strange thing is though, how we dress not only effects the way the world treats us, it also effects how we treat ourselves. Simply put, we feel and act differently when we’re all gussied up as opposed to in our old kome stained over-alls, or when we’re only in the garb of Eden.
Whenever I take self-portraits it’s always the same thing. I try outfit after outfit but none is quite right. They only capture a small piece of who I am. Each one a different lie of omission. So I convince myself to have a little wine. Try yet another outfit. Then i talk myself into showing a little skin. A little more wine, and a little more skin. And before I know it, I’m wearing nothing but a smile under hot lights, on a strange backdrop, and in front of the cold, cycloptic eye of my SLR. Well, to make a long, hard, story short, sometime before dawn, I always wind up taking advantage of myself.
Nude portraits just feel more honest; shedding all those societal roles, leaving them in heaps on the floor and standing proud with nothing to hide. That feels closer to our true Selves.
It’s strange looking back over my last 15 or so years of nudes; watching myself loose and gain muscle and fat – dye, dread, shave, and regrow my hairs – getting tattooed, and getting more, and watching them fade with age.
I now have highways of ink that run from my ankles to my neck. “Tattoos like mile markers map the distance gone.” as the song goes. I love all the little ways I’ve adorned this body-temple of mine, all its markings have great meaning to me – but also, with getting them I feel that I’ve lost something as well. Because of them I can never truly be au naturel again. It’s as if I’ve had the designs from my favorite articles of clothing surgically implanted under my skin. If I had it all to do over again, I don’t think I would get tattooed. But now that I’ve started, why the fuck stop now.
It’s nice to have this photographic evidence of my aging. It makes me feel closer to the person I’ve been. It’s gratifying to watch him grow and evolve. And now that my years are becoming more apparent I may take even more, because there’s beauty in that too… Not to mention, as with us all, this is the youngest, and probably best, I’ll ever look.
So i guess the moral of this story is that you should pose nude for some beautiful and proud portraits. One day, when like me, you’re old and gray, and can no longer recognize yourself under all the slipping skin, you’ll be able to look at the record of your youth and vitality immortalized, smile and say, “wasn’t I something.”
I know I have a romanticized view of nudie pictures but what can I say, I’m part naturist, both physically and philosophically, if such a thing is possible. I believe one of the most important things we can do is find out who we truly are beneath what culture has groomed us to want to be. I of course realize that “know thyself” has been said once or twice before, but today our entire world seems designed to keep us from deep introspection. Boredom, we’re taught, is a sin, and contemplation is a waste of time. But that’s where change begins. That’s how we become better people, by looking deeply into our undisguised selves, (genital) warts and all, and finding the things that we can improve.
Perhaps the world is so full of mass distraction because when we get quiet moments to scrape away the shit that society has coated us in, and examine ourselves, naked and honestly, we often find that our core values don’t exactly jive with its. But what can we do when we find we no longer want what we’re supposed to want? “To thine own self be true” is another old platitude we take for granted. It’s not easy being in conflict with the culture you’re drowning in, but just knowing that you’re doing what’s right and natural for you, can be as grounding, and as frightening, as gravity. And that’s how the world changes, people thinking for themselves. Like good heretics.
“Without deviation from the norm progress is not possible.” ~ Frank Zappa
