Slip: Naked in Your Own Words

SLIP is a book of portraits examining what it means to be naked as a profession, told in the words of the subjects themselves. It features a wide array of performers, models, actors, artists, designers, doms and dancers photographed by Allan Amato, with art and typography by creative raconteur David Mack.Is there anything more celebrated, or more reviled, than the naked human form? Is there anything as timeless or as ubiquitous? From high art to commercial advertisement to pornography, the world around us is saturated with the evidence that the human mind is obsessed with the human body.In Allan Amato's own words..."Three years ago, I began an informal nude series, featuring models, artists and performers I'd worked with and befriended in LA. My goal was to create a non-presentational kind of image that can't simply be objectified and dismissed. I wanted to explore something slippery, feral, harder to define. And as a person wholly committed to cowering behind the camera, I desperately wanted to know more about their motivation, their story."For those who brave the risk of being vulnerable on camera, the negative aspect of this experience is omnipresent: the shaming, judgement, stigma that is all too often deemed acceptable to level at those who express themselves via the medium of their bodies."But there must be a positive element as well; otherwise why do it at all? And while confronting the darker side is necessary and important, I'd rather the beauty not get wholly overshadowed. The result is a book dedicated to unravelling the complicated relationship we have to nudity, self-expression and commerce."