Adi Putra – Once in a Blue Moon (2014)

This is an impressive image. Not so much based on its virtues as its success in the face of ubiquity.

By that, I mean: I’m pretty sure everyone who has ever tried to make images of nudes in situ, has tried to produce an image like this and found the eventual product to be far less compelling than the impetus that spurred the act of creation.

This succeeds partly because of perspective (the horizon divides the visual field into constituent parts: 40% water and 60% sky–a result of the camera being positioned several feet lower than the usual human POV, which would’ve rendered the horizon bisecting the model’s waistline), allusion (pretty sure this pose in this environment is intended to recall The Colossus of Rhodes), ambiguity (the object in the sky is the sun, but with the weird effect of the strobe it’s difficult to tell whether or not its the moon, which is after all in keeping with the title) and the blue hair (which always commands attention).

Also, I really like how if you look closely you can see that she’s wearing sandals–a necessity if you’re going to walk on volcanic rock like that without cutting your feet to ribbons, the subtle reflection of her legs along with the sparkling glitter of the sunlight on the water’s surface and the fact that if you zoom in you can actually distinguish her shadowed labial cleft (not that it is a sexual image but to merely convey that whether or not nudity is sexual has nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with intent and consent.