I never became a naturist myself. But I kept one thing from that valley: a small, hand-carved sunflower that Elara sent me after the article came out. On the back, in her careful script, she had written:
When she finished, nobody clapped. There was just a long, soft silence, and then a man near the riverbank began to weep quietly, and someone else handed him a handkerchief. miss naturism
I did not photograph her body. I photographed her hands—resting at her sides, fingers slightly curled, as if still holding the warmth of her words. I photographed the feet of the young woman with the mastectomy scar, pressing into the moss. I photographed the old truck driver’s back as he bent to pick a wild strawberry, the vertebrae like a string of smooth stones. I never became a naturist myself
I kept the sunflower on my desk for years. And every time I looked at it, I remembered that the most undressed I had ever felt was not when I finally took off my clothes by the river on the last morning, but when I realized that no one had noticed I was wearing them in the first place. There was just a long, soft silence, and