Leucade Gaceta is a Chilean magazine, which is fortnightly and free. Its claim is that it ‘seeks to offer space for debate for diverse areas of aesthetic reflection’.

As such, you will find articles on various topics. My Spanish is far from great, more of a ‘tourist’ persuasion than for reading up on diverse aesthetic debate…but it’s exactly the sort of magazine topics I’m interested in. Below ( © 2017 Leucade Gaceta –image will be removed on request ) is an example page, and I’m working my way through it – with aid from Google Translate, the Spanish I know, and a EnglishSpanish dictionary. There’s an article on the Italian born novelist Alberto Moravia and how the film director Jean Luc Godard adopted one of his novels ‘Disprezzo’ (filmed as ‘Contempt’)

Interesting enough in and of itself so far, if that sort of thing interests you (it does, me).

I’m also drawn to the idea of this sort of magazine merely existing in times when print is in decline, exactly the sort of ‘buck the trend’ art meets good writing and rejects the received wisdom of what constitutes a good, digital era business model.

But you’ve already spotted another reason why what is a great little read (or longer read, without fluent Spanish) is of interest to this blog.

In the bottom right hand corner, a photograph. ‘Las Musas o Nada’ is something I can’t quite get a translation handle on. Is it intended to mean (as literally translated) ‘Muses or nothing’? Or ‘Nude Muses’ (the Spanish would be ‘desnudas’)? Is it ‘Muses wearing nothing’? Or some sort of play on words between ‘nothing’ and ‘nude’ (nada y (des)nudas)?

You can see why it takes me quite some time to plough through the magazine? 🙂

But it’s a photograph of ‘ordinary’ (in the sense they aren’t professional models, but still beautiful ladies), amateur, nude, Chilean women. And this is a feature of every issue of “Leucade Gaceta’.

I won’t reprint any of the images to be found -and they are numerous- of the ladies featured in the magazine, as they’re subject to copyright (and I’m not even particularly keen on using the single image I have utilised), but they have a Tumblr page, and you can scroll through the archives to see for yourself. The magazine also has a Facebook presence.

Where some magazines might have some objectification purposes for printing such images, it works beautifully in the context of ‘Leucade’ and its discussions on various aspects of art, essentially being a modern-day equivalent of ‘the nude muse’ as painted centuries ago. You can almost see that some aspiring art student might even rip the photo from the magazine to recreate it in oils.

I’ve not chased down every re-blogged Tumblr site, but in the main I’m pleased to see that (with one or two exceptions) the images are being re-tumblred on nude art Tumblrs rather than nude porn Tumblrs. I’d ask that you keep it that way and don’t feel you have to go sharing these images on some Tumblr that has nothing to do with either naturism or art.

 

What I feel about the images is that they plug-in to the idea of the historic muse. In some cases, similar poses, merely upgraded to the digital photography age. But in each instance drawing out the natural beauty of the models. No need for high heels or make up…just beautiful women in their natural state. There’s not as single woman, in my view, who’ll look back on these photos in 20-30-40 years time and say ‘I’m sorry I did that’ (unlike some with a phone in their hand posing for a naked selfie). Instead, I can see the women photographed having these photos framed, in pride of place, at their homes, proudly displayed for children or grandchildren. And why not? They should be proud!.

After 100 issues, it also goes to show that there’s a ready supply of models who adopt an entirely different view to nudity than their mothers might have done. To me, this is wholly positive, as the world increasingly shows evidence of a ‘meh! I’m naked, so what?’ attitude to life.

Congratulations to everyone involved…editorial staff, photographers and models alike, who’ve demonstrated what a wonderfully positive experience being nude in nature, as ‘a muse’, can be!

Ella