That’s River, She’s Great

Most photographers, when you ask about a shoot, give you something. Some context about the light, the location, what they were going for. An anecdote about the subject. At minimum a gesture toward meaning—something to hang the images on so you feel like you’ve understood them properly.

Darren Ankenman, who shoots regularly for Purple Magazine among other places, responded to a request for exactly that kind of context—about his photographs of a woman named River, taken in Los Angeles—with: That’s River, she’s great. Full stop. Nothing further offered.

I’ve been turning that answer over ever since.

There’s an enormous pressure—self-generated as much as external—to justify nude photography with the vocabulary of art theory. Brave social commentary. A subversive exploration of the gaze. The body as political act. All of which can be true occasionally, and sometimes genuinely is, but mostly functions as a permission slip: I’m not just looking, I have a thesis. As if the looking itself were the thing that required defending rather than the thing that was simply happening.

Ankenman refused the permission slip. He photographed someone he found beautiful. He found her great. The pictures exist. What more do you need to know?

I’m a man who likes looking at women, in photographs and otherwise. I’m not confused about that or particularly apologetic about it. What separates the photography I keep returning to from the kind that leaves nothing behind—and these qualify as the former—is attention. River in these images isn’t a surface. She has weight. She’s specific. That’s River. She’s great. Sometimes the only honest response to something beautiful is to just say so and stop right there.