The long silence emanating from the establishment where I'd hoped we'd be showing our first twenty or so photographs is looking like an unofficial "no" to our proposal. It truly is beyond comprehension, since we made the overly generous compromise of editing out any evidence of genitalia, and would essentially be showing only nude torsos of men. My first comment to the lovely E.B., who was the intermediary in this proposal, was "This is Montreal, not Mogadishu!". Bertram Brooker had it right in his commentary on Canadian conservatism in his 1931 essay "Nudes and Prudes", after one of his paintings was refused a gallery showing because of the nudity it depicted. Truly enough, in a real gallery setting today, usually populated by artists, hipsters and pseudo-libertarians, the photographs would not likely cause much of a flap. Yet in a city where on every street corner you can see a five-story nude flogging everything from vodka to jeans to telephones, this disconcerting disconnect is exactly the fissure we are attempting to explore in our photo essay and accompanying testimonials. Unless one's physicality is derivative of the Puget Sculpture Gallery, the naked self is considered an eyesore to be hidden away, decorated by the latest designer knickers configured to produce a simulacrum of the contemporary body aesthetic: the more skeletal and pre-pubescent, the better. Perhaps the fuel propelling me to write this commentary is the fact that in the stairwell of the very establishment that prefers to censure our photographs, is a poster depicting no less than ten naked women entwined in a strategically orchestrated embrace. That the representative of said establishment did not even notice the poster, is a testament to the the gender line that divides the acceptability of female versus male nudity. The commodification of the female body is a standard operating procedure of advertising agencies: are we so flooded with images of the idealised female nude that we are no longer surprised by them? I suspect that there may be a certain ageism at play here as well. Along with the many other denials we create in our minds in order to sustain a sense of order and well-being in our lives, is the denial of aging and death. Even the Buddha, who entreatied others to reflect often on the subjects of aging and death, was not immune to feeling its shattering effect on self-esteem and body image. As artists, we are attempting to create an environment of love and acceptance where the human form, in all its diversity, is worthy of the artistic - and the public - gaze. That we are so self-loathing that only the "perfect" amongst us feels deserving of this gaze I believe diminishes our sense of self, relegating our nakedness to the realm of shame, and making us complicit in the eugenification of the human species.