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‹ Photo Notes · 24 března, 2014
A hundred years ago people would probably have spoken like this about Paris; today Prague is considered one of the best places for nude photography. Why, and what is my experience?
If you think I’ve just made up some nonsense along the lines of „Czech girls are the prettiest in the world“, I must set you straight. I’ve heard this a great many times from many foreign photographers and from Czech colleagues living abroad.
What we live in mostly seems perfectly normal to us. I don’t have enough experience to speak about the whole world, but I often shoot with European models and am probably able to compare the different approach in different countries or nations. Besides our homeland, my best experiences are with Russia, Ukraine (and several other post-Soviet states) and Italy. Have I forgotten Slovakia? No, it follows right behind them.
In Russia and Ukraine there is a great multitude of models and non-models with an interest in artistic nude. Partly it is probably given by that „nas mnogo“ (there are many of us), so just as in that multitude you find lots of splendid Russian photographers, you find lots of really splendid models. Another reason may be a certain cultural-social interim period, when Russia got rid of the old Soviet values but hasn’t yet established new ones, and so it tests, searches for boundaries, shifts them and crosses them…
Speaking about the beauty of Russian (Ukrainian and other) models seems misleading to me – yes, they are often beautiful (not all), but thanks to huge migration few are pure Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar (ketchup…) and so on. Most of the girls I’ve met are half Russian, half Ukrainian, Kazakh, Tatar, Korean, Chechen … But following the Russian model they all seem to have an innate elegance (ever-present heels, makeup etc.).
I know quite a few European photographers who, besides Russia and Ukraine, like to visit Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia too.
Let’s go south, to Italy. Although the first Italian model who flew in to see me wanted to visit every church we met in Prague, and despite what is said about the relationship of woman and man in Italy, for me it is the next richest source of models in Europe. The mentioned subordination of woman to man concerns mainly southern Italy (and southern Europe in general); from Rome onward the whole northern half is completely different. The girls are modern, often „single“ etc.
And when I spoke of the charms of Russian models, I shouldn’t omit the Italian ones either. We generally have the notion that every (young) Italian woman looks like Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren or Ornella Muti. Even my first Italian model confirmed this rule. It isn’t quite true; wandering around Rome you don’t meet many gorgeous girls (seriously, it can’t touch Prague), but when it does work out, it is worth it.
I mentioned Slovakia and I mentioned the south.
My Slovak friend once told me that in Bohemia it is possible for a girl to confess to her boyfriend that she had ten other men before him. In Slovakia, reportedly, with such a confession she would be written off and be a „whore“. Starting with Slovakia the relationship of man and woman really begins to change, and further east and south this trend grows even stronger. That of course shows in nude photography too. It doesn’t mean the girls have no interest, but their social standing often restricts them. Slovakia itself is still golden, though; when I aim down into the Balkans, models start to thin out every 100 kilometres. Like southern Italy, Greece too is a country where it is very hard to find a model for nudes. And also, towards the south-east, there is more and more threat of serious harm to health caused by the model’s boyfriend. At the moment a model from Macedonia is arranging a shoot with me, but she has no boyfriend and moreover intends to move to Prague. Otherwise the percentage of my models from the Balkans is vanishing.
Damn, I forgot England. London and e.g. Brighton are bohemian cities and there are lots of models here. The only problem is that, unlike the fiery and beautifully mad Italians, Englishwomen are more conservative at least in that they don’t jump on the first plane to Prague.
What about neighbouring Germany? Almost nothing, dead… The exception is artistic and multicultural Berlin, regarded even by Germans as a state within Germany. In that it resembles London.
So what is so special about Prague?
Tomáš Houda, a Czech photographer living in Switzerland, once said something to the effect that in Bohemia you can approach a strange girl and tell her she has beautiful legs and a smile and that you’d like to shoot nudes with her. A Czech girl will often smile and nothing worse happens than that she turns down the offer. In Switzerland she would reportedly be capable of calling the police (in America, a lawyer).
Bohemia lies at the crossroads of Europe; here east meets west, and perhaps north meets south. From the east and south (and from Slavdom) we have a certain openness and also insufficient defence against the strong dollar and euro. From the west and north we have a modern atheist and emancipated approach.
Czech girls often have no problem with nudity, they have a positive relationship to nudity in art and are nowhere near as bound by subordination to men. With domestic photographers they commonly shoot for free, and for foreigners with hard currency they are cheap (that isn’t criticism, merely a statement of the economic power of the West against Czech incomes).
And apart from that, Czech girls are of course the most beautiful of all in the whole wide world 🙂
Prague definitely belongs among the best cities where it is possible to shoot nudes.