Day 175 - Naked Story

Naked Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Jefferson didn’t know her name, but in his mind he called her “Blue Jay.” He called her Blue Jay because she had a blue jay tattooed on her chest, drawn to look as if it had landed on her right breast and was singing a song, with musical notes spilling out across her body. Jefferson had stumbled onto the picture quite innocently. Jefferson was working on a short script that he planned on filming in the fall, so he had been spending a lot of time looking at headshots for actresses online. As he narrowed his prospective lead actresses, he spent more and more time on modeling websites. There was one actress that led him to Blue Jay. The two women worked together on a series of burlesque and cheesecake shots. There was something to Blue Jay that he was instantly attracted to. She looked happy, truly joyful to be doing what she was doing. Some models tried to look sexy and some tried to look serious. A few smiled, but it was always that forced smile for the camera. Blue Jay looked genuinely happy. It was innocent and pure and made her so beautiful that Jefferson couldn’t help but fall in love with her. One picture led to another and to another, until he found a series of nudes that she had modeled for. That was when the blue jay on her chest was revealed. That was when he invented the nickname.

One image stuck in his mind – it was a picture of her naked in public, standing posed with a statue in a park, as if she were part of the sculpture. Jefferson found it clever. He had lots of pictures of friends posing with statues and sculptures at museums, making obscene gestures and comical faces and things like that. He imagined Blue Jay had a similar sense of humor to his own. He had never thought about taking his photographs in the nude, but something in the simplicity of her smile inspired him.

It started off as simple as that. In his spare time Jefferson began taking photographs of him and his friends naked in public. They didn’t do anything particularly sexual or pornographic. Jefferson wasn’t interested in titillation. He was more interested in the challenge of capturing a candid and carefree moment. There was something alarming and comforting about taking people’s pictures in the nude. Some of his friends were embarrassed. Some wore masks. Most of them found that they loved it. There was an adrenaline rush. There was the fear of being caught. There was the excitement and thrill of doing something that seemed forbidden or naughty. And then there was the humor of getting other people’s reactions.

At first Jefferson didn’t think of it as art. Somewhere along the line, though, it transformed in his mind. He focused more and more on the world around the model and less and less on their nudity. He liked getting the faces in the background, seeing their reactions, their joys or reactions of disgusts. That made the moment real, the human reaction to the shock of seeing someone naked in public, posing for a picture.

Some of the fun was seeing if they could do it and not get caught. Some of the fun was seeing just how far they could push it and what were the most secure places they could get into. Jefferson and his friends went to tourist traps. They went to the beach. They went to theme parks. They sought out the busiest of busy places, where they were guaranteed to be forced into the middle of public scrutiny. They would run to the spot, strip down, take their pictures and flee.

Eventually Jefferson began a website to display his art. He considered what they were doing as a form of performance art. He argued on his blog that his art was about creating and capturing a real moment. He was evoking a human experience. If someone found it to be lewd or offensive, that was on them. He was capturing life, capturing existence.

Jefferson wrote an introduction to the website, thanking Blue Jay for inspiring him. He secretly hoped that she would somehow find out about the website and contact him. He knew it was next to impossible and realistically there was no way he was ever going to know this woman, but her carefree appearance in her photographs haunted him and he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

He opened the website up to contributors around the world. Soon there were naked people in cities around the world, standing in famous locations, holding a newspaper to prove what day it was, taking pictures. A large and diverse community grew. It seemed Jefferson had accidentally stumbled into a culture of artists he didn’t know existed.

Blue Jay never wrote him or contacted him directly, but one day a new picture was posted of her and an indistinguishable man, naked, recreating the “V-J Day in Times Square” photograph.

Jefferson smiled when he saw their photograph. She had done him the honor of posting to his website and she had played by his rules of doing what he was doing and using a very public place to do it. But she had also done him better by creating a piece of art based on someone else’s art. She was bold and ambitious and clearly had an appreciation for things worthy of note. Or maybe he was just projecting onto her what he wanted to see, what he hoped was true. But in his mind, it was a challenge. He took her idea and made something bigger. She took her idea back and made something better. She was asking him to do better, to be better. It was a dialogue of sorts. It was performance and communication and storytelling and possibly a little bit of flirtation mixed in. He hoped it was flirtation. He hoped that wasn’t just his desire and wishful thinking. Whatever the case, he knew it was his turn to make something bigger and better. He wondered if there was a famous painting he could recreate for her, or a scene from a movie he could rebrand.

Jefferson decided on the airport scene between Ilsa and Rick. He wore a fedora and a trench coat and nothing else. If she hadn’t been flirting with him, he certainly intended on flirting with her.

Jefferson posted the picture and then waited with anxious anticipation for Blue Jay’s next reply.