Clothes Optional, Forest Mandatory

After enough consecutive days in a city you start to feel the weight of being clothed as something more than metaphor. Every layer is part of the friction the city requires. You can’t just exist. You have to be appropriately formatted at all times.

Swiss photographer Roshan Adhihetty spent time with nude hikers—people who simply take it all off and walk into the forest—and the photographs are more interesting than the premise suggests. The bodies are various and specific, the light is real forest light, dappled and unreliable, and the faces are relaxed in a way that faces rarely are when being photographed. There’s a matter-of-factness to it that Adhihetty has clearly worked to preserve. These aren’t bodies for display. They’re just bodies, in a place where that seems like the obvious way to be.

I’m not a naturist and probably never will be—the nearest forest isn’t that near and I am, at some level, a person who requires walls. But I understand the pull in a way that feels less eccentric the longer you think about it. The sun on your back, no fabric between you and the air, the complete absence of the signaling layer that clothes inevitably carry. For a few hours, just the animal version of yourself, moving through trees that don’t care what you’re wearing.

These images hold the door open just long enough to feel what you’re missing before you close it again and go back inside.