CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/10/2022

Hot Book Alert! 'Nudism in a Cold Climate' is NEW from Atelier Éditions

Featured spreads are from Nudism in a Cold Climate, releasing this week from Atelier Éditions. Like all of Atelier's books (John Cage: A Mycological Foray, An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts, Sun Seekers, etc.), this 224-page paperback examining the idiosyncratic and rather under-studied phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain is as fascinating as it is beautifully designed. "Photographs are always ambiguous," author Annebella Pollen writes. "They are open to a wide range of readings and counter-readings depending on how they are seen, by whom, and when. Nude and nudist photographs are no different. They may have been produced for artistic, health, educational or sexual purposes, but their categorical certainty was always unstable, and the same models, photographers and photographs crossed the boundaries between these domains. The fluid status of nudes as beautiful and repulsive, normative and liberatory, spiritually uplifting and sexually arousing caused consternation and controversy in the contexts in which they originally circulated. In selecting and presenting images in this book, I acknowledge their original purposes, their alternative adaptations and their continuing potential to be read in multiple ways. The irony is not lost on me that in reproducing nude photographs this book adds to the discourse even as it scrutinizes it. I have chosen illustrations to include nudist and nudist-adjacent imagery across the candid and the romanticized, the elegant and the crude, the professional and the amateur, the earnest and the comic, the common and the unusual.…"