My first substack interview about nude photography - Video

The MidLife Edit

Usually I’m the one asking the questions. I’m the one setting up the lights, telling someone to relax their shoulders, waiting for the moment they stop performing and just exist in front of me. So it was strange, and honestly a little disarming, to sit on the other side of that dynamic for once.

A few weeks ago I did a video call with Jonny McD, who writes The Midlife Edit from Northern Ireland. He’d found The Naked Project on Substack, reached out, and asked if I’d talk with him about the work, not just the photography itself, but what it actually means to build something like this: seven years of asking men to take their clothes off in front of a camera, and everything that happens in the room once they do.

I said yes without thinking too hard about it, which is usually how the best things in my life have started.

What I didn’t expect was how much the conversation would turn into something bigger than the project itself. We talked about where The Naked Project came from, a low point, a notebook, a cheap camera bought almost on impulse during a trip to Chile. We talked about the six strangers who showed up at my house before I even knew how to properly use the camera. We talked about vulnerability, about the emotional weight gay men carry and rarely put down, about the difference between being naked and actually being seen. Somewhere in the middle of it, the conversation stopped feeling like an interview and started feeling like exactly the kind of exchange the project itself is supposed to create.

I’ve had my work shown in museums and festivals across a few continents now, and each of those has meant something. But there’s a particular kind of gratitude that comes from someone finding the work quietly, on their own, from thousands of miles away, and taking it seriously enough to ask good questions about it. Jonny did that.

So: thank you, Jonny. For the openness, for the humor, for treating the conversation like it mattered rather than like content to be filled in around a byline. If you haven’t read the interview yet, it’s live on his Substack, The Midlife Edit…… go find it. And if any of this resonates, know that the invitation is the same one that started this whole project seven years ago: whatever you’re circling around, whatever version of “taking your clothes off” applies to your own life right now the only way through it is to actually do it.