Miss Naturism Link

I raised my camera. For the first time all week, I knew exactly what to capture.

The contestants ranged in age from twenty-two to eighty-one. There was a former truck driver with a glorious beard and a spiderweb tattoo on his shoulder. A young woman with a mastectomy scar who spoke about reclaiming her body from a year of chemotherapy. A retired postal worker who had taken up naturism at sixty and learned to forgive her own reflection. 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. I raised my camera

“You were the youngest contestant there. You just didn’t know it.” There was a former truck driver with a

The magazine published my photo essay two months later. My boss was nervous—would the readers understand?—but the response was overwhelming. Hundreds of letters came in, from people of all ages, all shapes. They didn’t write about nudity. They wrote about permission. Permission to exist as they were. Permission to let the sun touch the parts of themselves they had kept hidden for decades.

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.