Story Noº 10 / 151: Nothing Can Harm Me at All

Noº 10/151: Nothing Can Harm Me at All
Collection: Above the Tree Line

People often assume that nudity automatically creates sexuality.

The internet has spent decades encouraging this misunderstanding.

Yet standing beside a freezing waterfall in a canyon while your friends wait patiently for you to “get the shot” doesn’t feel particularly sexual to me.

Yes, there were five of us that afternoon. By the end we were sweaty, tired, satisfied and considerably closer than when we started. But the experience had far more in common with a difficult hike than anything the internet might imagine.

The photographic truth is that nudity and sexuality are neighbors.

They live in the same building, but not on the same floor.

Sometimes they visit each other.
Sometimes they don’t.

This is the second full-frontal nude photograph I have ever released.

The first one was a self-portrait.

In both cases, my intention wasn’t to make an erotic image.

I wanted something closer to a classical nude. A figure that felt as though it could have stepped out of a painting or emerged from the stone itself.

The older I get, the more radical that seems.

Not the nudity.
The ease.

Look at him.

His body is completely exposed. He simply exists. As if he has found, if only temporarily, a place where nothing needs explaining.

I sketched this photograph while listening to Jimi Hendrix’s May This Be Love.

There is a line in the song that has followed me for years:

Waterfall
Nothing can harm me at all
My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall

The song, much like the pose itself, drifts somewhere between a love letter and a prayer.

When I look at the image, I don’t see a naked hunk.
I see a man whose guard has finally come down.

Someone who has stopped scanning the horizon.
Someone who has stopped explaining himself.

He lives in a place where the world cannot quite reach him.

Maybe you know the feeling.

That brief and extraordinary experience of being exactly where you are, exactly as you are, and discovering that nothing needs to change.

That feeling is rarer than most people realize.

I grew up in an environment where feeling comfortable in your own skin was not something you could take for granted.

Maybe that’s why I keep returning to the nude.
Not because the photographs preserve what happened.

They don’t.

The rainbow disappeared.
The people who were there have all gone home.

What remains is the feeling.

One of the unexpected pleasures of being an artist is knowing these feelings will end up hanging in homes I will never visit.

In hallways.
Living rooms.
Bedrooms.
Places where ordinary life unfolds.

Long after the waterfall is gone, someone will walk past this image and remember a person. Perhaps a place. Perhaps a version of themselves they had forgotten. And for a moment, they too will know what the photograph knows:

Nothing Can Harm Me At All.

If this was worth your time, pass it on.

This work will become a book.
Photographs and field notes by James Miille
Words by Jona Montoya