Nakedness & Nudity - Indecent Exposure or a Bare Faced Lie?

Have you ever met someone new, a new friend or acquaintance, a work colleague or even a potential partner perhaps, and they’ve revealed something about themselves you would never have guessed?

That cute looking guy in your office who you always seem to bump into at the water machine and have an awkward sweaty-palmed conversation with about “staying hydrated”? Well guess what - it turns out he’s a Frisbee champion . Or has a PhD in Dendrology. Or is an amateur taxidermist. (Incidentally there aren’t any cute guys in my office that linger around the water machine.... sadly....although I think there might be a man who’s a taxidermist, and come to think of it I’ve definitely seen a Frisbee tucked under his desk).

It doesn’t matter what 'it' is really, it’s just that that is the fantastic thing about people – they have an endless capacity to surprise.

I think it’s because we live with ourselves everyday - and are so used to the workings of our brain, the things we have achieved, and the ways in which we like to amuse ourselves - that we often forget about ourselves that we also have an endless capacity to surprise – perhaps even to shock. We’re so close to our own selves, so familiar with our own sense of who we are as a person, that it’s often incredibly hard to step back for a moment and consider how a 'revelation' about ourselves might suddenly change the way that someone sees us.

Not so long ago I was talking to someone new and I revealed a little 'something' about me. I happened to mention that I work very occasionally as a life model . It’s something I did on a whim - a very well thought out and emotionally motivated ‘whim’ of course - when I was at University. I met a fabulous artist and modelled for him and, since then, for a few different colleges and art schools.

Now, I know this about me and I also know what it’s all about so I often forget that sometimes people just don’t get it, and that in revealing it to someone I can lay myself bare to criticism, misunderstanding or – at best – a slightly bemused expression. What, you take your clothes off? All of them? In front of ..... people???

The ‘surprise’ of being reacquainted with my own capacity to surprise another in revealing this aspect of my personal life prompted me to think. And what it got me thinking about was this;

What is the big deal about nudity? Is it the inevitable connection that people make in their heads between nudity and sex? If so, what is the relation between nudity and sex? And really, when all is said and done, do we reveal more about ourselves by stripping off and baring our bodies, jumping into bed with someone and having sex OR by opening our mouths to reveal something of who we are?

Now, to my mind, nudity is nudity. It doesn’t equal sex. It’s always been my experience that sex is so much more to do with what happens between two people when they have their clothes on than when they have their clothes off. The nudity part is just a functional requirement of having sex; it’s almost incidental, and in any case, it’s not the meaning. Sex, to my mind, is like the full stop at the end of a sentence; there has to be words and meaning beforehand for the full stop to have any purpose. Similarly nudity, taken alone without the context of a fully clothed relationship, is just a full stop; punctuation without any grammatical significance.

Sex, I think, is the punctuation in a fully clothed, content laden, purposeful conversation; sometimes (if you’re lucky) that punctuation is a “!”, sometimes (interestingly) a “?” and sometimes (sadly) just

.

But however our sexual lives are punctuated, and however many “!” we may or may not be blessed with, without the prerequisite of clothing, sex becomes empty grammar.

So if nudity really is something altogether different from sex, what is it about it that causes us to raise our eyebrows?

It is, of course, the feeling that in being nude we open ourselves up to the most terrible of things – to exposure. And not just to exposure per se, but exposure to being human.

It’s very hard to lie about being human when you are in a state of complete nakedness. Particularly when you are life modelling, it’s also very hard to lie about what particular ‘form’ of you human you are; everything is suddenly on show, in all its toned, wobbly or just-plain-saggy glory and you are suddenly no longer “you” but just a nude, a figure, a source of artistic inspiration. It’s scary stuff, admittedly, but there’s also something very liberating about the experience, something very ‘levelling’, and ultimately (as there would be for me) an opportunity for some kind of philosophical reflection.

Nakedness is, in this sense, incredibly exposing. But in a funny kind of way, it’s also perhaps the most potent and effective form of disguise.

When I stand in front of a class full of art students – people who are complete strangers to me – it isn’t me they get to see, but just a body. Don’t get me wrong, art students and teachers are almost always incredibly friendly and appreciative of their models, but at the end of the day nobody is really interested in who I am and what I do, what I think or what I feel, what I had for my breakfast or what I’m going to have for my tea. Having been left very peacefully to sleep through a forty minute pose only to be woken temporarily with a polite request to “change position now” I know very well that it’s not me that’s of interest during a life modelling session, but rather my functional significance as an object with which to practice their drawing.

Likewise, when it comes to sex, there isn’t necessarily anything particularly exposing about it. At least, not if you’re having the kind of sex which I would, according to my ‘definition’ above, consider to be “empty grammar”. If it’s meaningful and truly intimate and preceded by the appropriate amount of clothed conversation then yes, it can be exposing in the most wonderful and beautiful of ways. But this isn’t, I don’t think, always the case.

No, it is not in nudity nor in sex that we expose the most about ourselves, but rather in the words we speak and those small moments of ‘revelation’ when we share something about ourselves with someone for the first time. Peeling off our clothes to bare our bodies as a life model - or to engage in some entirely different kind of naked ‘activity’ – isn’t necessarily a moment of exposure at all but, as I’ve suggested above, actually a moment when we can ‘cover up’ who we really are in the most powerful way.

It’s the incredibly revealing power of words that I personally love and it’s probably for this reason that I take great pleasure in writing. It’s probably also the reason why I try to live my life with an ideal of honesty, of speaking the truth. I mean, if you’re going to ‘reveal’ anything about yourself to anyone, is it not always best to reveal something real, something true? But therein lies a question for another post perhaps.....

For now I want to end this piece back where we began - back at the water machine in the office, having our awkward chat with the cute Frisbee playing taxidermist with a doctorate in the study of woody plants. Now we might not all have such a weird and wonderful list of things to reveal about ourselves but I can guarantee there’s something about all of us which has that same capacity to surprise, to shock, to shift someone’s perspective on who we are. Maybe we’re just too close to see if, but I really do believe that it’s often the things we consider most mundane or boring about ourselves that others consider to be the most interesting or relevant.

For me, such a ‘revelation’ might be found in sharing an anecdote about my life modelling experiences. But even if being an artist’s model isn’t your ‘thing’, I think it’s worth asking yourself what it is about you that has that capacity to surprise and to shock? And it is also, to my mind, definitely worth taking a risk in allowing yourself to become a little ‘exposed’. There’s something very liberating and exciting about inspiring either response in the face of another person, and something even more liberating about revealing something of yourself to the world and saying “this is me”.

But perhaps I’m wrong about all this and you think I’ve missed the point somewhere? I’m never worried about admitting I’m wrong if I really am, and I’ll be the first to acknowledge another point of view if I believe it to be honestly held and well thought out. So now, I’ve revealed a little bit about me in writing this post, why not reveal a little back and tell me what you think.......I’ve showed you mine, isn’t it about time you show me yours?

* The image used is The Model by Tamara de Lempicka, 1925

Portraits and Pictures – A question of Image

I’ve been looking at some old photos recently. Sorting them through. Deciding which ones I want to keep or throw away. Some hold memories of times with friends or family, or of someone significant who is, for whatever reason, no longer around. Some only bring a tinge of sadness and that small dull ache felt when something touches upon a sore memory, a war-wound endured at some point along my life so far. Photos often function as a means by which a moment in our lives can be lived again, and as I was sorting through photos today I felt both the pleasure of reliving a smile and the pain of recalling injuries sustained. (Incidentally, I wouldn’t want to deny myself of either).

As well as recalling memories, photos are also incredibly good at reminding us of who we were at a certain time in our life. But, on the other hand, have you ever had that feeling of disorientation when you stumble across a photo of you where you don’t recognise yourself? But that’s not me! I don’t remember my hair being that long/short. Nooo, I never wore that did I? God, don’t I look slim/fat/like Gwyneth Paltrow. Ok, so I’ve never looked at a photo of myself and thought “Oo, don’t I look like Gwyneth” (although it’d be a rather grand day if I did) but the point is that photos can sometimes confront us with an image of ourselves that we don’t recognise – and sometimes don’t like.

The great thing is, of course, that if they’re our photos we can simply throw them away or stick them under the duvet, behind the radiator, in the microwave maybe. If they’re on Facebook we can ‘un-tag’ them (a very rare feature of Facebook I actually like, and have found useful on more than one occasion). But when they belong to someone else, well, that’s a bit trickier. Short of breaking and entering I can’t really sneak round to my best mate’s house and steal back those embarrassing photos of me when I was thirteen and had bad hair, bad glasses and even worse dress sense.

So it’s an inevitable fact then that somewhere out there, under someone’s bed, on someone’s bookcase of photo albums or (horror of horrors) on someone’s mantelpiece, someone is holding onto one of those “but that’s not me!” photos, and there’s not really a lot you can do about it. Those pictures, sadly, are you, they’re part of your life story, and they reveal a truth about you that’s undeniable.

After all, the camera never lies, does it?

Maybe not. But what about a portrait? I recently spent an afternoon visiting the National Gallery. I went to see the Christen Købke exhibition, Danish Master of Light, and it got me thinking about portraits and pictures. As I sat and looked around the room at Købke’s portraits I wondered what it was - if anything – I could learn from these paintings and, on a broader scale, what it is I could learn – if anything – from any portrait. Does a portrait portray a truth about the character of the subject, their story, their virtues and vices? Or does it present us with a lie, an illusory image designed to seduce the viewer into a particular way of seeing the sitter?

One obvious difference between a photo and a portrait of course is the role of the artist. Now, I’m not for a second suggesting that photography isn’t also legitimately ‘portraiture’ in the fullest sense of being an art-form, but the photography I’m referring to here isn’t art photography, but ‘snapshot’ photography – the type of photos taken on a night out with the girls or by your dad when you’re least expecting it at some family ‘do’. No, in portraiture there must, by necessity, be an artist who creates, whereas in snapshot photography there need only be someone who points and shoots. So, given the essential role of the artist, what is their job as the portrait artist – to recreate a ‘true’ image of the sitter or to interpret and inspire a specific perspective?

In either case, whether a portrait portrays or betrays a truth or lie about its sitter, what is it about that afternoon spent at the National Gallery that stuck with me and got me thinking? And why would this, and the process of sorting through photos, prompt me to emerge from my blog-writing slumber and write another post? Well, it all comes down to this – whether it be the art of portraiture or the artlessness of snapshot photography, it’s all a question of image.

I worry about image a lot. And no, not because I’m horribly vain, but because I’m horribly human. Its part of being human, I think, that we reflect upon who we are and how we present ourselves to the world. Most of us check ourselves, even if only cursorily, in the mirror before we leave the house. If going for an interview we don our best suit or slip on our smartest heels. We buy a new dress or shirt for a first date and spend hours preening ourselves in our bedrooms, checking our hair, putting on make up. Why? Because we care how we look. We care how we come across to other people. And because we want to be in control of how other people see us. And of course it isn’t just a question of our physical selves. Do we not all strive to present outwardly that image of ourselves that we most want the world to see? An image of strength, of confidence, of intellectual or physical achievement. We don’t tend to want the world to see those bits of ourselves we’re not so keen on – our insecurities, our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses. Isn’t it fair to say that pretty much all of us attempt to keep these bits hidden away from people, at least from those we don’t know, have only just met or perhaps just don’t trust?

In this sense then it seems to me that we are all our own portrait artists, each of us standing with brush and palette in hand and a canvas before us on which to create an ‘image’ of ourselves. We all have a certain degree of control over the “snapshot” we provide of ourselves to the world and a certain degree of control over which snapshots get stuck in the photo album and which end up in the bin. But that control is inevitably limited, for at the end of the day there will always be someone who sees us differently to how we see ourselves, and more often than not this is in fact the case.

I know there have been times when I have felt my brush and palette being taken away from me and an image painted of me which I neither recognise nor like. This can be as uncomfortable, if not more, as seeing one of those “but that’s not me” photographs. When this happens its good perhaps to remember that we can reinvent and recreate ourselves as many times as we want on our canvas – there’s no limits to this and no limits to the images of ourselves that we can present to the world. If we feel ourselves trapped inside a picture frame of a portrait of ourselves that we don't like then there’s nothing else to do but to force yourself out and slip into your artist’s smock. Hold the brush rather than be the canvas, choose your own palette rather than be coloured by another’s image of you - the chances are you’ll end up with a far more beautiful and brilliant artwork than you could ever imagine.

It’s a bit of an epic this post, admittedly, and so I wanted to sign off this piece with some wise words. As is my way I went on a search for a good quote. Now, I have to admit I’m not really a Star Trek fan, but after stumbling across some quotations from Deep Space Nine on Wikiquote (as one does) I must say I’m seriously considering becoming one. I was amazed by the sheer philosophical brilliance of quotes such as

“There comes a time in every man’s life when he must stop thinking and start doing.”

“It takes courage to look inside yourself and even more courage to write it for other people to see.”

And finally,
“Females and finances don't mix” (my personal favourite!)

Geeenius!

So, it is with the wise words of Jadzia Dax that I’ll sign off for now;

“If you want to know who you are, it's important to know who you've been”.

What better reason then to dig out those old photo albums...... Those old pictures of you never lie you know.

* The image used is by Jeremy Lawrence, www.futtfuttfuttphotography.com