I have been thinking about doing this book in various forms since the late 90's.  My inspiration came from a book I discovered by French photographer Marc Riviere titled up & down.  Basically he walked around Paris and asked women if they would mind letting him photograph their breasts.  The fact that he had the gall to try something like that is impressive enough.  The fact that he found enough willing participants to fill a book just amazed me. 

The U.S. and France aren't that far apart in today's world however; culturally we are worlds apart.   In the U.S. is someone where to try what Marc did in France most likely they would be arrested and charged as a sex offender.  This made me think about what was so wrong with the human body that it could never be shown.  Why was American society so different than France's?  There were many more questions that it raised.

I knew that I could never answer all of my questions in a single book.  At times I wasn't sure that I could answer any of the questions but I was sure that I could make people think and ask their own questions.  After 10 years of thinking about this I stated shooting my book Brazen & Bare. 

I never had any intention of copying Marc Riviere and approaching women on the street.  My intention is to show the human body as it is, natural.  Maybe as a society we can come to view nudity for what it is, our natural state, the way we came into the world.  We need to stop equating the naked body with sex and porn.