How many of you are in the closet?

No, not sexually, photographically.  Have you told your friends, neighbors, family, that you’re a photographer or model?  More specifically your nudes, your sexually themed images.  How many of you hide it?  Don’t talk about it except with other photographers or models?  You know there was a post a few days ago on ModelMayhem about a photographer who hid his nude photography from his wife.

Why?  Why do we do this?  (I’m guilty of it to at times)  Many of you will give reasons (excuses).  Sometimes it’s just to make ourselves feel better, cause it’s easier, like not telling your parents.  Other times it could really effect us.  I myself was fired for bringing some of my nude images to work.

But shouldn’t we be standing up for ourselves?

There’s a scene in the movie Milk, where Harvey Milk is talking to his friends about how to defeat a ballot proposition that would remove all homosexual teachers from California.  Now I’m paraphrasing here,  Harvey Milk says “We have to come out of the closet, We have to show them that they know one of us.  That this will hurt their friends.  That we are people too.”

Prejudice against nude photography and nude models may not be at the same level as homosexuality, but the same tactics will work.  We have to show people that we are not sexual deviants.  We have to show people that photographers are not predators.  That models are not sluts, or whores, or porn stars (not that there is anything wrong with porn stars) just because they take their clothes off in front of a camera.  We have to stop hiding our work, and ourselves, in order to change peoples attitudes.