There is so much to love about this image. Just as a composition and moment of captured life, it's a master work. But that's not surprising. It was made by Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who is best remembered for his iconic image of V-Day at the end of WWII. He photographed the famous, like Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and before is death in 1995, the first family Clintons. This image is from Life magazine. But as interesting as the photographer's fame and talent, what I love is the model.
I love how beautiful she is, of course. So pretty, but in a natural way. With a slender, but not skinny, figure, round hips, petit breasts, and her hair back in a simple bun, like a ballerina. She looks so very much like the Girl Next Door. The "All American" girl. And maybe she was. She looks to be college-age. And this image is taken at a college. Maybe she was a student here, at University of Iowa. The Heartland.
Today, it would take guts to be a student in Iowa, and volunteer to pose nude before an art class. But what makes this photo even more powerful is the year that this was taken: 1961.
On the radio might have played Bobby Vee, Patsy Cline, Del Shannon, or the Shirells. Or the radio news may have reported the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, or that the new president has created a new government-sponsored organize called the Peace Corps, or that he has vowed to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, or that he has sent the first of American "advisors" to Vietnam.
Somewhere in the cold snow-swept fields of the mid-west, a young, small, scruffy baby-faced kid named Robert Zimmerman, was packing an acoustic guitar to New York, where he hoped to meet his musical idol, a nearly-forgotten folk singer of the Great Depression, who had silently suffering in a state hospital from Hutchinson's disease.
And deep in the South, a bus filled with Civil Rights protesters is firebombed.
In this picture is America, on the teetering point of a new and tumultuous decade.
A young woman in Iowa sits naked, on a wooden chair, before the intent eyes of sketching art students.
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