There are certain themes that will continue to accompany the valued reader here with almost stubborn regularity, much like Cato the Elder’s famous ceterum censeo, which returned with stoic persistence regardless of the actual subject of his speech. One of those recurring themes, apparently, is nude photography.
And anyone entering here may, to borrow from Dante, abandon all hope of never encountering that subject again.
There, the pedantry may rest for a moment, and we can come to the actual point.
When people discover that I photograph nudes, their reactions tend to move somewhere between indignation, confusion, mild horror, and a kind of speechless disbelief. Quite often, this triggers what I can only describe as a reflexive bite response. Depending on the situation, I find it either amusing or simply exhausting. Of course, this does not apply when the conversation involves people close to me. There, the discussion is different—often deeper, more serious, and far less theatrical.
One particularly illustrative moment happened during a business dinner in Switzerland. I was asked, in a tone bordering on accusation, why I photographed only young, beautiful women. Surely, from a feminist perspective, that was problematic—if not entirely unacceptable.
Well.
I took out my phone and showed my portfolio on Fotocommunity. The oldest woman in those images was sixty-five. The heaviest, officially, weighed 130 kilograms. And all of them were photographed beautifully.
Not in the sense of artificial beauty filters or cosmetic deception, but in the sense that their presence, their charisma, and their personality became visible. The comments underneath were consistently respectful, admiring, and often genuinely moving.
Even within the Artis Umbrae universe, there is a model well beyond fifty. Should she ever read this article: my warm greetings, and my sincere respect for what she brought in front of the camera. I very much hope we will create many more projects together.
That is precisely why one thing matters deeply to me: for my work, it is entirely irrelevant whether a so-called ideal figure is present, how old a model is, or whether gravity has spent the years doing its very disciplined work and certain parts of the body no longer occupy the locations where contemporary beauty standards would prefer them to remain.
Perfection is boring. I am not interested in standardized surfaces. I am interested in presence, intelligence, charisma, and the ability to make ideas visible through pose, posture, expression, and those delicate layers of micro-expression that make an image breathe. I do not photograph the number on the scale in the morning, nor the number inside a passport.
Those numbers do not stand in front of my camera. A person does. A face. A body. A posture. A story.
Perhaps this is also the true origin of portraiture itself. The word “portrait” is often linked etymologically to the idea of drawing forth, of bringing something into visibility, of making something emerge. In Latin, protrahere means exactly that: to pull forward, to bring to light, to reveal. Not merely to depict, but to uncover something that already exists.
It is no coincidence that one of my photographic series carries that title. I am not interested in surface as decorative wrapping, but in what becomes perceptible beneath it: presence, tension, personality.
Photography, to me, is successful when it does not confirm the surface, but reveals the person.
It is worth stepping back for a moment historically. Not so very long ago, people whose bodies did not conform to social norms or dominant beauty standards were publicly exhibited as curiosities. In the panopticons and fairgrounds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, little people, individuals with visible physical differences, and particularly overweight women were displayed as attractions. Vienna’s famous Prater amusement park had its own versions of this spectacle. One well-known example was a woman nicknamed “Prater-Mitzi,” who became a local symbol of that voyeuristic gaze—a person reduced to public curiosity rather than private dignity.
For exactly that reason, dignity in photography is not optional for me. It cannot be a polite “one probably should.” It is a prerequisite.
Perhaps this is also where the real challenge lies when photographing people who do not fit prevailing ideals of youth and beauty. Because there it becomes obvious very quickly whether the camera becomes an instrument of dignity—or whether it merely reproduces the same old gaze that reduces human beings to deviation, spectacle, or numerical classification.
I am interested in the opposite. Not deviation from a norm. Not spectacle. Not the supposedly extraordinary. I am interested in the person.
A body that does not correspond to media standards is not a problem a photograph must solve. It is not a flaw that requires concealment. It is a body with history, presence, expression, and personality.
Perhaps that dignity is exactly what good photography must make visible. Perhaps that is the point where photography becomes more than simple representation.
Good photography begins where numbers lose their authority. Where what stands before the camera is not weight, age, or measurements—but dignity, presence, and personality.