Our Natural Blog

NATURISM, ART & PHOTOGRAPHY — I love photography, but I also love art, and naturism. So I combined all three!

My dad was really into photography, and I think some of that zest for the picture quest rubbed off on me. I grew up with a camera in hand, old school style with 35mm film photography. But things really sort of moved forward when I decided to buy a Canon 10D with a 50mm f1.4 lens, there was no longer a punishment for trying new light experiments, so I broke all the rules and learned a lot about light. Up until a few years ago, i didn’t really have an overlap between naturism and photography, in fact, I didn’t really start photographing people until around 2008, when I decided to try out fashion photography. Prior to that I had mostly taken pictures of family, friends, surfing, etc. But fashion photography gave me a full gambit of creative directions, and added all sort of imagination that felt like being in a creative candy store. The feeling that anything was possible sort of rejuvenated my life-long interest in photography and capturing light.

In some ways this blog and the @Our.Natural.Life instagram exist because I just so happened to meet and fall in love with somebody with whom I shared so many interests. She was raised as a naturist…how uncommonly lucky for me. Her dad was an art professor, so she is an admirer of art and aesthetics….bonus! She loved my photographic style…awesome! We love traveling…yay! We like exploring….sweet! The list goes on and on. So this blog, essentially, is so many of the things we like to do for fun all wrapped up into one place! And we are having so much fun bringing it to life!

So, maybe I should get on to the actual subject. Naturism has a pretty specific philosophical heritage. I’m a bit of a deep end researcher of things that pique my interest. While I was researching the philosophical roots of naturism, I found many photos from 1910’s-1940’s that I consider sort of “pure” in a way that the naturist photography that came after that seemed to lack. I feel like visually, when the movement was new, it was fresh, the ideals were clear. To me the photos seemed to convey a heavenly quality, above the plane of lust or gratuitous nudity. There were strong references to the artistic styles of classicism and romanticism, and strong images of mankind being one with nature, unencumbered by clothes. In a single photos, these images seemed to capture the essence of core naturist philosophy….back to nature, good health, movement, simplicity/minimalism, sunshine, water, free from lustfulness, free from clothing, and just a vibe of complete eternal freedom.

I’m a visual person, and I sort of indexed these images into my brain for future reference. Ironically, “Nude Art Photography” has made up only a small amount of my photographic work, but whenever I’ve delved into that category, I have done so with respect towards naturism and the philosophies upon which it was founded. I can’t really get into the mindset of gratuitous nudity or “cliche sexy”, those compositions bore me because they are two-dimensional, they only say what they say, and nothing more. To me, a body is an amazing machine, and a nude body is an expression of freedom that is best enjoyed in nature, with the elements.

Did I mention I’m also a fish? Underwater photography is lots of fun; another thing I love to do. Combining naturism and water is also an automatic recipe for fun. Underwater photography is so different from anything else, that maybe I should do a separate blog post about it sometime. It’s really an interesting creative process, and not nearly as graceful as the final photos seem to imply! :)