Naked Los Angeles

The people of Los Angeles are men and women of all shapes, ages, colors, and professions living in a city famed for its Hollywood glamour and perpetual summer. Photographed outdoors we see a magician, screenwriter, trapeze artist, unemployed surfer, filmmaker, casting director, aerospace engineer, and many more. This serious and, at the same time, amusing group of portraits shows the surprising differences and not so surprising similarities we have to one another clothed and unclothed.

Unlike traditional nude photography, these portraits don't have erotic or sexual overtones; they are simply real people who reveal both their clothed public selves and their naked private selves. Greg Friedler's work as a documentary photographer is a kind of anthropological survey of people. If clothing is a voluntary choice, unclothed we see people in an involuntary state—we see their bodies as we see their faces, unmasked. These images are at once deeply intimate and refreshingly matter of fact.

Greg Friedler is a commercial and fine-art photographer whose work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Nerve, and The New Nude. He lives in Denver, Colorado.