Miss Naturism ✰

When she finished, nobody clapped. There was just a long, soft silence, and then a man near the riverbank began to weep quietly, and someone else handed him a handkerchief.

It was the summer of mismatched expectations. I was twenty-three, a junior photo editor for a glossy but unadventurous travel magazine, and my boss had just handed me an assignment I was certain was a prank. miss naturism

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. When she finished, nobody clapped

My anxiety about nudity melted into a stranger anxiety: I was the only one hiding. I was twenty-three, a junior photo editor for

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.

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.