Check Out French Photographer Marc-Antoine Serra's Boys of Summer
International travel may be way down this summer (for obvious reasons), but those who can get to the Mediterranean island of the Ile de Levant, a unique locale made up of a large military installation and a nudist camp, where a current exhibit celebrates the island's openness to embracing the human form.
"People are free to practise naturism (that is to say, be naked) everywhere except in the village square and the port, where a minimum of dress is required, which is understood to mean a thong or g-string or a sarong," reads a description on the website WikiVoyage. "It is obligatory to be naked on the plage des Grottes (Cave Beach) and on the coastal walkways."
The island's embrace of the naked body makes it the perfect locale for an exhibit by French photographer Marc-Antoine Serra called "The Smile of Rita Renoir," on view in various island locations through September 20. "Scattered around the naturist area of H�liopolis and at HeliOtel, these nude shots give pride of place to the surrounding nature as well as to its models," writes an interview with Serra on the website T�TU.
Serra is a former resident of Paris who now resides in Marseilles, where he "frequently delivering portraits of men who are both naturalistic and intimate." Last summer he participated in the NU2 festival on the �le du Levant. It was there he took the photos seen in the exhibit. He also discovered "the house and the ghost of Rita Renoir, a character I knew nothing about. This astonishing artist and partly erased today was stripper, actress, choreographer... This series of photographs is addressed to her in posthumous homage," he told T�TU.
He was also a former employee of T�TU, where he served as artistic director 2004 to 2010, which he recalls as a "painful and exciting experience." Exciting because he "met interesting artists there and working with them taught me a lot; painful because "the pace of publications (at the time monthly) is terrible to keep up."
For more on his work, visit his website and his Instagram page.
Below is some of Serra's work on view in his current exhibit. (Note: some have been edited. Visit this page.