This week, as spring presses on and we hurtle toward summer, I wanted to share some photographs from last summer from a series of pictures I shot by the river.
In Vermont, where I usually spend the summer, there is a gay swimming hole, where gay men can hang out naked and enjoy the summer sun.
One afternoon last June, when my friend Ben was visiting from LA, we ran into Michael, a painter I had met while cruising in the forest the summer before.
It was apricot season so I’d brought along a jar full of apricots to snack on while we lazed the day away casually spread out on the green bedsheet I had brought.
I wanted the photographs to feel like Courbet’s 1853 painting The Bathers. Courbet’s work is so casual and immediate yet still reverent. The way his figures seem to arch themselves in stiff repose that is neither causal nor planned.
It was one my first trips to the lake that summer, Michael had the day off of work and we met up there later in the afternoon than expected, so the sun was nearly set as we touched ourselves in the summer warmth.
Have a great week,
Matthew