Ten Awkward Minutes: Notes From a Naked Shoot

There's a stretch of about ten minutes at the start of every naked shoot where I forget how to stand.

My arms don't know what to do with themselves. I catch my stomach pulling inward, which is ridiculous, because nothing here is being hidden. The photographer waits. The light waits. A heater ticks somewhere behind me and I'm standing on cold wood in nothing at all, deciding all over again whether I'm going to perform nakedness or just be naked.

That decision is most of the job.

The video we shot last Saturday came out of those ten minutes.

We kept the set small. Three people, including me, and a list of boundaries we talked through before anyone took a lens cap off, then talked through again. If you're new to being photographed nude, that part matters more than the lighting. A shoot where you can't say "not that" isn't a shoot, it's a trap. Consent in front of a camera isn't a one-time signature. You can change your mind at minute forty. You can stop, put on a robe, and drink the tea that's gone cold on the windowsill. None of that ruins the work. It's what makes the work possible.

After that, the afternoon got simple. Late sun through a window I couldn't close properly. Dust drifting through the beam where I could see it and nowhere else. Goosebumps that arrived on their own schedule and stayed for the wide shots. I was cold for most of it. My knee has an old scar from a bike crash when I was eleven, and in some of the frames it catches the light and looks like a comma.

When we watched the playback, something surprised me. The frames I liked weren't the ones where I looked best. They were the ones where I'd stopped thinking about the camera. Half a second of me laughing at something someone said. My hand flat on my lower back because it hurt, not because it looked graceful. A moment where I forgot I was being looked at, and got seen instead. Those are different things, and you can feel the difference in a photograph even if you can't name it.

I've spent years unpacking the habit of checking myself in mirrors. It doesn't vanish because you decide to be a naturist. Some mornings I still catch my reflection and run the old math: shoulders too wide here, softness there, on and on. Nudity didn't fix that. What it did was make the math boring. Standing around naked long enough and the body stops being an argument and goes back to being a body, which is all it ever was. It gets cold. It gets tired. It wants to sit down.

If you're curious about doing something like this yourself, here's what I'd say. Start indoors, or somewhere private and legal. Start with one person you trust, or with a camera and a timer and nobody at all. Agree on what happens and what doesn't before you begin. Then be patient with the first ten minutes, because they're always awkward and awkward is not a warning sign. It's just the cost of entry.

The video is out now, and yes, it's the NSFW cut, so it lives wherever that kind of work lives. What I hope you notice in it is smaller than a body. A guy who stopped holding his breath somewhere around minute eleven.

Thank you for reading this far. If you've ever stood in front of a camera — or just a mirror — and felt that first-ten-minutes panic, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. Comments are open, kindness required.