“I never thought I would shoot nudes,” says Dutch photographer Lotte van Raalte of her latest series, turned exhibition and now book, BODY. Spanning 160 pages, BODY celebrates the visceral beauty of the female form, capturing the embodied experience of being a woman – scar tissue, stretch marks, wrinkles, and all – in its resplendent glory.
With an already successful career working in fashion for the likes of adidas and Stella McCartney, BODY marks a major turning point for the 30-year-old photographer. The idea came to her in early 2018, when she was shooting a beauty campaign in Morocco. Van Raalte’s eyes wandered from the model’s perfectly smooth skin to that of her producer’s, whose birthmarks and smattering of freckles quickly caught her attention. “The sun was shining and I asked to do some close-ups of her instead. One thing led to another and she was unclothed. I thought, this is so beautiful. It felt so liberating to have no styling, no nothing, just a pure human being.”
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