There was a time when the sight of a camera on a naturist beach would have resulted in a group of male naturists approach the cameraman and ask for the film to be removed in front of them, and for all other film to be handed over. These voyeur cameramen generally complied, for fear of their camera equipment maybe being thrown into the sea. After all, are you going to challenge a group of men who were demanding privacy, less for themselves as for the usual target of the camera, their women.

Was the cameraman going to go to the police and claim he’d had film ‘stolen’ while surreptitiously shooting naked women without permission? Very doubtful.

Somewhere along the line we went digital in so many aspects of out lives, photography included.

And our phones, complete with good cameras, are now an essential part of our daily lives, ubiquitous in their presence.

So cameras, in the shape of our phones, became a familiar sight everywhere, not just on the beach, and with social media came our desire to record our lives in minute detail. ‘Here I am on the naturist beach’…maybe accompanied by a photo or two not taken entirely surreptitiously. The idea of photographing and being photographed took hold and with social media (and blogs & websites) ‘amateur nude photography’ exploded in size.

There are very few of us who don’t have some ‘naughty’ photos on our hard drives, be they of the naturist beach or bedroom variety. It’s part of life, part of many people’s sex lives too.

We also like to talk, even when at the beach, and an afternoon’s sunbathing often includes a lengthy chat at the naturist (or textile) beach.

We talk. We text. We read texts. We lose ourselves in our phones and maybe aren’t aware that we’re now being openly photographed on the naturist beach, women in particular. Women, it seems, are the ones who need to chat, even while at the beach. I searched for a photo of a male naturist on his phone on the beach and couldn’t find a single one! 🙂

What also happened, somewhere along the line, is that there was a tacit acknowledgement that photographs happened on phones, that our naked forms might end up in cyberspace. But rather than shrink from this notion, naturists or topless sunbathers seem to have simply accepted that photographs will be taken, and that they too will take them, so much so that the sight of good, digital cameras on a beach is unremarkable. As long as you aren’t too obvious that you’re snapping a pretty woman and invading her personal space to do so, there seems to be an acceptance that you may end up in someone else’s photographs.

That’s good, in one way, as people now have less hang ups about their own nudity. It’s bad that people end up on porn sites without their knowledge.

One thing that’s certain is that the number of nude beach photos is likely to grow every year, and people will become ever more blasé about their inclusion in them.

Trine