Sun and Skin and Nothing Else

You know the feeling when someone shoves you out the door in July—turn off the computer, go outside, it’s summer. You stand there blinking in actual sunlight, wondering what to do with yourself. Watch fish under a bridge. Sit in a tree. Find a fox. None of it remotely compelling.

Alyssia McGoogan has a better answer. Photographer Alessandro Casagrande shot her outdoors somewhere warm and green, and she spent the session lying in the grass without a piece of clothing on, looking exactly as comfortable as anyone should look in the middle of summer. Casagrande has a feel for natural light—he finds the soft hours, the places where shade and sun are still negotiating, and lets his subjects settle into them rather than fight the camera.

I’m not going to pretend I need a more sophisticated reason to spend time looking at these photographs. Skin, grass, good light, a woman who knows how to exist in front of a lens. That’s the whole argument summer ever needed to make.