Clothed with Nature

The indigenous populations of the Americas have long been a source of inspiration for natural associations to nudity, such as the work of Javier Silva Meinel. A photographer from Lima, Peru (b. 1949), Silva Meinel studied both economics and photography and won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Andean rituals. He has also photographed and published on bullfighting in Lima, and on the human ecology of his country’s swath of the Amazon rainforest. He has held solo showings in the US and Europe and exhibited widely in Latin America.

Photograph by Javier Silva Meinel

I find his black-and-white nude portraits enchanting, because although they are rather obviously posed and thus artificial, they are still very natural in their incorporation of fish, snakes, trees, and other elements of the environment. Nature is literally draped on and around the nude subjects. His Anaconda II deliberately mixes the staging of a backdropped photoshoot with the staging of the Amazon rainforest itself. Perhaps not as deliberately, the image even references one of the most famous photos of Brazil’s naturist pioneer, Luz del Fuego, posing with her serpent. Bordering this text are two more examples from Silva Meinel’s work that explore the masculine and the feminine, the burden and the adornment.

Photograph by Javier Silva Meinel

Silva Meinel’s photographed subjects should not be mistaken, necessarily, for naturists, or for clothes-shunning indigenous people. As participants in the set-up of the shoot, the subjects in his work are very conscious of their roles in producing images. Yet the nature (in many senses) of his work reminds me of a text I read in Portuguese and reproduce here below in English: “Natupári” (I Reject), the speech of an indigenous leader from the Madeira River basin in the southern Amazon region of Brazil. He is speaking to a modern outsider, perhaps upon first contact with “modern civilization,” which for his people, the Parintintin, did not happen until the 1940s:

There are some terrific slogans here about being clothed with nature: “The best thing for covering our bodies is sunshine.” “The navel of the tribe is the entire body, and it needs to breathe without clothes covering it.” These are ideas that support Rousseau’s assertions about natural humanity, which in turn helped shape modern naturism in early twentieth-century Germany.