/Girls on Film
"One Saturday in 1968..."
By Chelsea G. Summers
One Saturday in 1968, my mom announced to me that I was going to spend the afternoon with Ron and Rob, the twins from my first grade class in Fox Lake, Illinois. It was a grey day, and the landscape looked flattened, hammered, the color of old pewter. I didn’t really know the twins; I mean, I knew them, sure. There were only 25 kids in my class, and they were the only matched set. But we didn’t really hang out. They were boys and rich and I was neither, so it was strange for us to be thrust together that Saturday.
The twins’ house was big and peculiarly modern, as lots of rich people’s houses were in the ‘60s. There was a lot of paneling, and every piece of furniture was sleek, shiny and uncomfortable. My mom, visibly excited, shoved me in the room with the boys. We were given plates of snacks and admonished not to leave the room. We tried to play, but the three of us were uncomfortable together. The boys hung off their bunkbeds and made a lot of poo jokes, and I tried to laugh.
After an hour or so, my mom came to check on us. She was wearing only a robe, and she was smiling. An hour or so later, my mom and I left.
Riding home in the car, the thin late-winter light like a malingering thing, I asked my mom what she was doing with the twins’ dad.
“Taking pictures,” she said.
Can I see them? I asked.
“No,” she said, her eyes set on the road.
Why? I asked.
“They’re naked pictures,” she said. And that was that.
A handful of years later, I found the pictures in my mom’s underwear drawer. They were, indeed, naked pictures. They’d be called nudes then—and now, I suppose. Black and white, bordered all around by a demure white strip like a nun’s wimple, the short stack of prints showed my mom smiling and smoking, her skin fresh and glowing. Her clothes came off. She sat on a chair looking off into the distance, breasts bared, a tiny smile shadowing her mouth. She was 25 in those photos. They still sit in her dresser, though they’ve moved to her accessory drawer.
In 1994, a photographer asked to shoot me for German Playboy. Regrets, I have a few, but one big enough to mention is that I didn’t give an automatic yes to that offer. I regret not choosing to bare it all and lay about on a big white, fluffy rug, scrunching my breasts together like pomegranates and gazing at the camera as if it were on the verge of making me come like a wildebeest in heat. I regret not having the cheesy photographic proof, my elegant body propped in a doorway, girlie lasciviousness on my lips, Tam o’Shanter all jaunty-like upon my head. I regret not having my genitalia splayed in shiny shell-pink glory across some seamed page. I regret it, regret that loss, and I turned it down because my boyfriend told me I should.
The girl on film holds a peculiar power—as does the boy on film, but I’m going to put him on a shelf, at least as much as I do a pedestal—because a photograph is a commitment to a moment that lasts a millennium. Once you’ve been photographed naked, you can never be unphotographed naked. It is not, like some spontaneous stripping in a summer storm, an act that can be relegated merely to memory. There is evidence, as long as there is a negative, and negatives last a really very long time.
Some might argue that the apparent permanence of a photograph is exactly why no girl (or boy, see above) should bare her body to a camera. It’s an idea that I pronounce pure tosh. In favor of the naked photo shoot is the immutable fact that bodies change. It’s barely worth mentioning, but you get older and, as you do, you want the evidence of youth.
There is a fuck-it gorgeous clarity to posing ass-naked.
After an hour or so, my mom came to check on us. She was wearing only a robe, and she was smiling. An hour or so later, my mom and I left.
Riding home in the car, the thin late-winter light like a malingering thing, I asked my mom what she was doing with the twins’ dad.
“Taking pictures,” she said.
Can I see them? I asked.
“No,” she said, her eyes set on the road.
Why? I asked.
“They’re naked pictures,” she said. And that was that.
A handful of years later, I found the pictures in my mom’s underwear drawer. They were, indeed, naked pictures. They’d be called nudes then—and now, I suppose. Black and white, bordered all around by a demure white strip like a nun’s wimple, the short stack of prints showed my mom smiling and smoking, her skin fresh and glowing. Her clothes came off. She sat on a chair looking off into the distance, breasts bared, a tiny smile shadowing her mouth. She was 25 in those photos. They still sit in her dresser, though they’ve moved to her accessory drawer.
In 1994, a photographer asked to shoot me for German Playboy. Regrets, I have a few, but one big enough to mention is that I didn’t give an automatic yes to that offer. I regret not choosing to bare it all and lay about on a big white, fluffy rug, scrunching my breasts together like pomegranates and gazing at the camera as if it were on the verge of making me come like a wildebeest in heat. I regret not having the cheesy photographic proof, my elegant body propped in a doorway, girlie lasciviousness on my lips, Tam o’Shanter all jaunty-like upon my head. I regret not having my genitalia splayed in shiny shell-pink glory across some seamed page. I regret it, regret that loss, and I turned it down because my boyfriend told me I should.
The girl on film holds a peculiar power—as does the boy on film, but I’m going to put him on a shelf, at least as much as I do a pedestal—because a photograph is a commitment to a moment that lasts a millennium. Once you’ve been photographed naked, you can never be unphotographed naked. It is not, like some spontaneous stripping in a summer storm, an act that can be relegated merely to memory. There is evidence, as long as there is a negative, and negatives last a really very long time.
Some might argue that the apparent permanence of a photograph is exactly why no girl (or boy, see above) should bare her body to a camera. It’s an idea that I pronounce pure tosh. In favor of the naked photo shoot is the immutable fact that bodies change. It’s barely worth mentioning, but you get older and, as you do, you want the evidence of youth.
It’s more than that, however. There is a fuck-it gorgeous clarity to posing ass-naked. The slick sweet nothing palpable on a photographic print, the way that that nothingness hangs in the air as the camera goes click! click! click! These are ineffable beauties that exist only in the minds of the viewer, and yet they are there. They waft with the musk of just-fucked-freshness. They are so imperceptible as to be nearly deafening.
And there is this: If you revel in telling the conventional to go to the 7th Heaven/Saved by the Bell/Touched by an Angel hell they deserve, you’ll be hard pressed to do much better than getting yourself photographed naked early and often. You could, I suppose, do porn, the X-Games of naked photography; you could also make a DIY sex tape. There is the Law of Rob Lowe (also known as the Incontrovertible John Edwards Effect) that states that any sex act taped for private consumption will turn public. The porn tape is for the daughters and sons of ministers and rabbis; the rest of us can document our rock-starriness with provocative still poses.
Other than a boyfriend capturing on his cellphone my face delighted and his cock shiny with slurpy spit, I have only once been photographed naked. I was 24, about the age my mom was when she disrobed for the twins’ dad’s Leica. Unlike my mom’s, my photographer was not some hot guy. He was old, or old to me. His hands looked like knotted rope and his hair stood out in a wiry aureole. He had the appearance of an extra pervy, elongated Woody Allen, and I posed for him anyway.
He paid me $150, which seemed like a lot of money. He kept on wanting to me to rub my nipples, in lieu of his rubbing them himself. I wore some vintage pink tank top and a denim mini-skirt, which I slowly disrobed. I rolled and arched and looked at the camera as if I wanted to fuck it or eat it. Either way. The pervy Woody Allen clicked away and talked of taking me scuba diving. I laughed him off, and turned and preened, arched and swayed, and I felt both unsettled and elated. This guy had taken my high school graduation photo, though he didn’t remember me and I didn’t remind him. After a couple of hours, I took home two Polaroid prints, one dressed, one undressed. They have since gone lost.
About ten years ago, I read that the photographer had been arrested for kiddie porn. The police took boxes and boxes of prints and negatives out of his studio. I imagine mine were among them. The photographer was convicted. I imagine the photos the police took from his studio are there still, those photos of that young me, fresh and glowing, with feathered hair and natural breasts, smiling forever at the viewer, at the bottom of a box, in the dark, in perpetuity.
I don’t regret posing for him. I only regret I lost those two Polaroid pictures. The conventional world is kindly invited to go fuck itself.
And there is this: If you revel in telling the conventional to go to the 7th Heaven/Saved by the Bell/Touched by an Angel hell they deserve, you’ll be hard pressed to do much better than getting yourself photographed naked early and often. You could, I suppose, do porn, the X-Games of naked photography; you could also make a DIY sex tape. There is the Law of Rob Lowe (also known as the Incontrovertible John Edwards Effect) that states that any sex act taped for private consumption will turn public. The porn tape is for the daughters and sons of ministers and rabbis; the rest of us can document our rock-starriness with provocative still poses.
Other than a boyfriend capturing on his cellphone my face delighted and his cock shiny with slurpy spit, I have only once been photographed naked. I was 24, about the age my mom was when she disrobed for the twins’ dad’s Leica. Unlike my mom’s, my photographer was not some hot guy. He was old, or old to me. His hands looked like knotted rope and his hair stood out in a wiry aureole. He had the appearance of an extra pervy, elongated Woody Allen, and I posed for him anyway.
He paid me $150, which seemed like a lot of money. He kept on wanting to me to rub my nipples, in lieu of his rubbing them himself. I wore some vintage pink tank top and a denim mini-skirt, which I slowly disrobed. I rolled and arched and looked at the camera as if I wanted to fuck it or eat it. Either way. The pervy Woody Allen clicked away and talked of taking me scuba diving. I laughed him off, and turned and preened, arched and swayed, and I felt both unsettled and elated. This guy had taken my high school graduation photo, though he didn’t remember me and I didn’t remind him. After a couple of hours, I took home two Polaroid prints, one dressed, one undressed. They have since gone lost.
About ten years ago, I read that the photographer had been arrested for kiddie porn. The police took boxes and boxes of prints and negatives out of his studio. I imagine mine were among them. The photographer was convicted. I imagine the photos the police took from his studio are there still, those photos of that young me, fresh and glowing, with feathered hair and natural breasts, smiling forever at the viewer, at the bottom of a box, in the dark, in perpetuity.
I don’t regret posing for him. I only regret I lost those two Polaroid pictures. The conventional world is kindly invited to go fuck itself.
- 08/03/2010
