2013 – the year I lost control of my image!

Celebrities understandably fear the photographer who seeks to capture them going about their ordinary lives. Whether that photographer is paparazzi, or an amateur who stumbles across them, the fear is that they lose control of their image. The carefully posed and manicured photo commissioned by Hello! is a world away from the ordinariness that could be captured by a photo in the streets.

Before participating in the World Naked Bike Ride in Brighton this year I had always felt in control of my nude image. That is despite the proliferation of nakedness of my good self on the internet since the mid 90s. This feeling of control was because I took the photos – and I decided where they would go and who was likely to see them. For the many embarrassing or less than flattering images – there existed the delete key to deal with those.

This year’s decision to participate in the World Naked Bike Ride meant that I was going to lose all control. And I was a little apprehensive about it. Being photographed by random people in the streets was not so worrying – I regarded the randomness as part of the great anonymity of living in a city. However direct requests to take photos of me potentially to go in the press would be more concerning. So what happened almost immediately at the start of the ride? Well, I just found I couldn’t say no 🙂

Thanks Simon (fotografm on flickr) for that pic of me being snapped by Gail Orenstein – I am glad I looked a bit more relaxed in Gail’s own picture that went online at the Demotix agency site!

This, and the photos of me and my escort, taken by BareWitness on flickr, have to be the best captures.

But should I be worried anyway? How many images of me are in any case going to be floating around the internet as a result of my participation in the Brighton Naked Bike Ride? The only real place I know to find any is flickr, and that is where I have looked. The sum total just entered double digits. I have learned from this that the most obvious ways I can help my image (in my eyes anyway) is i) to try not to smile with my lips clamped together and ii) avoid any effort at posing!

     

The last three were taken by Elaine, a participant who stopped me and asked if I had any photos of my slogans, which she then proceeded to take with my camera.

My own situation contrasts with that of the many young females such as Elaine who were riding naked in Brighton the same day as me. There will be hundreds or even thousands of images captured of each one of them. In particular females have to cope with the very obvious close attention of photographers at the start and end of the ride and at rest point on the route. There is no doubt that the presence of obtrusive photographers has ruined the WNBR experience of many women.

I do assume that there are many celebrities who would love to be able to do stuff like the WNBR but are prevented from doing so through concerns about the impact on their image. When the Mail Online goes to town over the hint of a celebrity nipple, it is few who have the balls to do what Amanda Palmer did and strike back by baring all.

It takes a certain strong mentality to be able to rationalise and say ‘fuck it, I don’t care’. It’s a mentality that I admire and is a mentality that I have had to try to cultivate myself.  I’m not going to pretend that I have succeeded yet.

The other notable potential loss of control of my image in public was on my naked hikes with Will and Richard, or on my own….

I have written about those hikes extensively already in the earlier posts on this blog. In particular, the theatrics on a bridge over the River Ouse captured by a guy who claimed to be a BBC cameraman could have been a televised loss of image control if it were not for the fact that the cameraman embarrassed himself more than he could ever have embarrassed us.

A further opportunity for loss of control came at a little workshop that I facilitated for naturists at the White House club. Most of the images I turned up in cannot be shown here because they include other people. This is my own edit of a colour original by Peter L. As is often the case for my own images, I have converted to monochrome and severed my head 🙂

I hope to participate in many more such group activities in 2014. I’d rather just be another participant, model or photographer than facilitator, but I’ll always be happy to share my photographic experience.

So why have I gone and gratuitously posted all these images here? It’s to illustrate through their numbers and content that I have finally grown up about my perception of my body. I can’t emphasise enough that I do care about keeping fit and lean and all that stuff and that I really ought to do more to keep my limited musculature in shape. But through posting them all, without self-censorship, I can lose some of the last elements of the self-awareness about my body that has been slowly chipped away at over a long period of some 40 years.