A photo essay, studying what it means to pose nude

Allan Amato, the photographer behind The Temple of Art, is kick starting a new book with our friends at Baby Tattoo! S L I P: Naked In Your Own Words is a study of folks who pose nude for a living discussing their experience.

From the KS page:

Slipping past the inflammatory nature of the naked form, we celebrate with words and images, the courage of those who reveal the most.

Three years ago, I began an informal nude series, featuring models, artists and performers I'd worked with and befriended in LA. My goal was to create a non-presentational kind of image that can't simply be objectified and dismissed. I wanted to explore something slippery, feral, harder to define. And as a person wholly committed to cowering behind the camera, I desperately wanted to know more about their motivation, their story.

For those who brave the risk of being vulnerable on camera, the negative aspect of this experience is omnipresent: the shaming, judgement, stigma that is all too often deemed acceptable to level at those who express themselves via the medium of their bodies.

But there must be a positive element as well; otherwise why do it at all? And while confronting the darker side is necessary and important, I'd rather the beauty not get wholly overshadowed. The result is a book dedicated to unravelling the complicated relationship we have to nudity, self-expression and commerce.