“Miss Naturism,” he said, sliding a thin file across his desk. “The annual pageant in the south of France. Get the spirit of it. Not the… uh, anatomy. The spirit.”
I did not photograph her body. I photographed her hands—resting at her sides, fingers slightly curled, as if still holding the warmth of her words. I photographed the feet of the young woman with the mastectomy scar, pressing into the moss. I photographed the old truck driver’s back as he bent to pick a wild strawberry, the vertebrae like a string of smooth stones. miss naturism
She did not speak about nudity. She spoke about touch—the feel of rain on her shoulders, the pressure of wind against her back, the way river water felt different when it met every inch of her at once. She spoke about her mother, who had died of melanoma at fifty-four, and how after that, Elara had promised herself she would never again be afraid of the sun. She spoke about shame as a kind of clothing we forget we are wearing, and how taking it off is the hardest undressing there is. “Miss Naturism,” he said, sliding a thin file
I opened the file. The first page showed a photograph of a woman with silver-streaked hair, standing on a rocky beach, arms raised to the sun. She was naked, but you didn’t notice that first. You noticed her smile—wide, unforced, the kind of smile you only see on people who have just finished a long swim in cold, clear water. Not the… uh, anatomy
I never became a naturist myself. But I kept one thing from that valley: a small, hand-carved sunflower that Elara sent me after the article came out. On the back, in her careful script, she had written:
The magazine published my photo essay two months later. My boss was nervous—would the readers understand?—but the response was overwhelming. Hundreds of letters came in, from people of all ages, all shapes. They didn’t write about nudity. They wrote about permission. Permission to exist as they were. Permission to let the sun touch the parts of themselves they had kept hidden for decades.
On the first day, I kept my camera in my bag. I wore a sundress and felt absurdly overdressed. Everyone else was bare as stones, and after a while, I stopped seeing their bodies as anything remarkable. They were just people: reading, playing pétanque, peeling oranges. A grandfather taught his granddaughter how to skip stones. Two women shared a bottle of rosé and laughed at something on their phone.