Variety is Beautiful

One thing that has always made nude photography exeptionally fascinating for me is the incredible variety of the female body. There are so many tiny little things, for example the shape, size and color of nipples and breasts, the size and shape of labia and so on, which can be completely different for each woman. And for some inexplicable reason this fascinates me more than anything else in nude photography. What surprises me- horrifies me actually - is that I think a lot of people, (both men and women) who don't look at a lot of nude women, photographed or otherwise, have no concept of this amazing variety. They think the one or two bodies they may have seen are the only possibilities, or even worse, they have adopted as fact societal ideals of perfection in the female form.

What I find most wonderful of all is that there is no specific combination of these millions of factors that make up the perfect body. Beauty, I wholeheartedly believe, is an incredibly complex and flexible thing that can never be reduced to a formula. In fact for me, beauty lies not in perfection, but in the wonderful variety of shapes and sizes of the female body. And unfortunately, I think that a lot of people who don't spend any time marveling at the female body in person or in photographs never come to this realization. Here are some galleries that I think highlight the beauty of variety: