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Lost in the Forest
by Kim Winderman
In cinema romance, pretty young couples strip bare and tumble onto the fern-mottled forest floor, giddily wrestling on beds of fallen leaves and moss as if it were all a plush duvet. Those who have been nude in the woods know that this is not how it works. The dirt is hard-packed and usually damp. Everywhere are sprawling tree roots and barbs of twigs. Dried leaves and plumes of fern fronds offer only the illusion of cushioning; moss grows on stones. It's an unforgiving landscape to recline on. Just passing through gets you poked, scratched and tickled.
That's why I love Kim Winderman's photographs, and why nakedness in the forest makes people appear so instantly nymph-like: softer, velvety, more exposed and delicate than they'd look in the midst of Times Square. Soft focus and streaming sunlight disguise the fact that the subject in this series, whose body touches ground once and then never again, is not collapsing into the embracing arms of nature. She's walking on it, occasionally grabbing at it with her hands — the toughest skin on one's body being located on the underside of the extremities — and spending the rest of the time observing from a comfortable distance. — Will Doig
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