If Nude Photos Alarm You, Proceed With Caution

In addition to the usual items in a photographer’s studio — soft boxes, a spot light, a tripod — Stuyvesant Bearns of Lakeville has a collection of high-heeled shoes and elaborate Edwardian-style wigs. That’s because among his interests in fine-art photography are nude women. Usually in black and white, some adorned, some not, wonderfully lit and all of them beautiful.

To mark his 80th birthday, Bearns will exhibit some of the images he has taken in the last six years at the Center on Main in Falls Village Sept. 8 to 10. 

Now, in his other life, Bearns is an attorney, a cautious lot in general, so he will set a warning on the entrance to the exhibit: a big red stop sign, a photo of a beautiful nude woman walking in the woods and a message: something like, if this alarms you, do not enter. 

Bearns’ first model long ago was his wife, who liked walking in the woods without clothes. That’s how he got started. Now he hires models to lie on granite rocks or stroll around the foliage or pose in the studio.

“It’s all very professional,” Bearns says. They come in, they sign a model release form, they take off their clothes, he shoots, sometimes out of doors, sometimes in the studio above his barn, he pays them $100 an hour plus travel costs and off they go.

He met his models during a recent workshop on photographing nudes at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. There he studied with Bobbi Lane, a well known photographer and teacher who pressed her pupils on exposing to the right and checking their histograms for good exposure and other technical matters.

But there are poses many emphasize in nude photography: Bearns says the students at CPW worked on using light and shadow to sculpt the figure. And often, posing tends to eliminate the face and focuses on parts of the body. Bearns, however, includes the face in a lot of shots, because he wants to get the women’s expressions in the image. 

Now he is on a new project, inspired by a book of photographs taken in 1912 in a New Orleans bordello by a photographer known as Bellocq. These tritone images show prostitutes in their off time drinking wine while playing cards, or posing for the photographer: many of them dressed, some of them barely, and the rooms they worked in decorated with state banners and pictures. It is touching and revealing.

So now Bearns is working on his own book of photographs. In the meantime, his work is on exhibit this weekend in Falls Village.