Natural Beauty

Photography/Model/Art Direction: Centerfold Angel

It was on a hot California day when I was walking to the beach and talking to my dad on the phone, that I got distracted by a piece of paper fluttering in the grass. From a distance I noticed it was a nude, a piece torn off of a porn magazine. I was enamored, this vision of an image that is meant to be looked at in private, simply here sprawled across the open lawn. I told my dad I’d call him back. Skipping in the heat, I began to pick up multiple pieces. From sexy nuns, to blondes spreading their legs, and a woman doing things with someone in a gorilla costume, I gathered them. These torn up images and the juxtaposition of their location became inspiring.

My gleefully perverted eyes are always on the lookout for naked ladies. I am forever intrigued by the pin-up ladies in the magazines and the secrecy it used to hold and where people choose to display them. With images from my project “Make Yourself Your Own Sex Symbol,” I created this series of images entitled “Natural Beauty.”

In “Make Yourself Your Own Sex Symbol” I took self-portraits inspired by the vintage pin-up era and then printed them into a magazine. I started ripping up the magazine, playing around with the paper, taping them onto walls, and rephotographing the image. Giving my work a new life, something that felt more tangible.

While quarantined in Wisconsin and exploring land there, I grew this idea further. I took my magazine tears into nature. I feel my most beautiful while being underwater when the sun glistens on the top of the water, I wanted these ladies to feel the same freedom. In the water I watched my hard work get torn apart by the river current and sink to the bottom. I thought the process was thrilling, watching the delicate sun gaze upon this paper. The series feel serene and yet like some misfortune happened and these images blew away, landing here. You ask yourself the same question I asked myself when I stumbled upon that lonesome magazine piece in California, “what are you doing here?” Like a fragment from a sunken ship, the angel in the centerfold arrives in her natural beauty.