Suds and Smiles

Samantha Fortenberry photographs strangers naked in bathtubs. It’s straightforward work—people sitting in water, surrounded by whatever she decided would be perfect for that moment. Cookies one time, books another, confetti another. The series is called Suds and Smiles.

I’ve always thought there’s something about bathrooms that lets people drop the performance. You’re already exposed, already trapped in one place, already committed to doing nothing. The bathtub is where it becomes honest.

What Fortenberry’s photographs document is exactly that moment—the person who agrees to sit in a tub naked while a stranger photographs them. You’d think that would produce something sensual or vulnerable in the classical way, but it mostly doesn’t. Her subjects aren’t performing vulnerability. They’re just sitting there in water. The foam is on the surface. That’s the whole thing.

I think what I like about these images is how unselfconscious they are. There’s no trying, no one claiming the bathtub is a metaphor for rebirth or childhood innocence or any of that. It’s just the place where a person will sit still long enough for someone to document them doing absolutely nothing. And that honesty—the willingness to be that ordinary, that exposed—is actually more radical than the nudity.

The bathtub does this to you anyway. You fill it with hot water and climb in and nothing else matters. Fortenberry just photographs what was always true. Someone in water is someone at peace, or at least someone who stopped fighting. The rest is just foam.