Contour is a photographic project that celebrates the female form by exploring and referencing classical black and white nudes. Each of its images involves a thinking process before being made, and is a deep collaboration between the subject and myself. I want to show the female body as a delicate, elegant, and powerful vessel emanating beauty and confidence. The project is in part a reaction to the debasing of the female figure and the way it has desensitized our culture to the nude’s classical beauty.

Contour’s images, all made in the studio, feature both isolated details of the body and full-figure images. This is my way of providing viewers with a more complete understanding of the body form. To further avoid the formulas of traditional nude photography and bring my own signature to the work, I rely on several other visual strategies. These include using studio lighting to deliberately obscure or reveal parts of the figure, rather than for traditional modeling effects; cropping that is often tight, for similar effect; the inclusion of props such as plants and reflective materials in the image; and the incorporation of both motion blur and multiple exposures to repeat certain elements of the image in order to emphasize the figure’s shape.

One result of these strategies is that most of the images obscure the subject’s face. In this way, the figure study is not of a specific person, but achieves a certain universality—one that makes the nude more allurring, I believe. Likewise, I chose to produce Contour in black and white, both to create the more abstract quality discussed above (particularly for viewers who generally expect color) and as a reference to the classic nudes of photographic history.

Along with celebrating the beauty of the female form in a nonintrusive and respectful way, Contour is a statement about female confidence, elegance, and force. As the photographer, I found the process of creating the project to be personally transformative, disassociating nudity from vulnerability and associating it with empowerment instead. My hope is that the experience has also been empowering for my subjects, while at the same time giving viewers a heightened appreciation and new reverence for the female form.