everyone in my photography class has seen me naked and none of them know it

this happened last semester and I've been sitting on it ever since because I have genuinely nobody I can tell.

I had this mandatory photography class that I was deeply not interested in. the teacher was cool but I did not care about aperture settings or whatever. there's this big assignment at the end of semester where everyone submits a photo for a showcase and when the teacher was going through examples she put up a few that had some nudity in them. tasteful, artsy, clearly intentional. I waited after class and asked if I could do the same.

she said absolutely, as long as it wasn't explicit.

I went home and thought about this for approximately ten minutes.

then I set my phone against my desk lamp, set the timer, and took my clothes off.

I want to be clear that I actually put effort into it. spent nearly an hour on angles and lighting, moving the lamp around, trying different positions, keeping my face out of frame the whole time. I didn't want it to look like a random naked girl in bad lighting. I wanted it to look like something. I ended up going with a side profile shot on my bed, natural light from the window catching the line of my back and waist and hip in shadow, sheet pooled just below the curve of my ass.

It looked really good honestly. I looked really good.

I submitted it and told the teacher the model was a friend who wanted to stay anonymous.

The showcase was a few weeks ago.

I stood in that room for two hours with a cup of bad punch watching my classmates walk past my naked body on the wall and make comments. someone said the lighting was incredible. someone else said whoever the model was had a great figure. a guy from my tuesday seminar stood in front of it for a solid minute and said it was his favourite piece in the whole show.

I said I'd pass that along to the model.

my teacher stopped in front of it near the end of the evening and told me I had a genuine eye for the human form and that the intimacy of the shot was what made it work.

I said thank you and took a sip of my punch and kept my face completely neutral.

A girl from class asked me later if it had been hard finding someone willing to pose nude. I told her finding her was actually surprisingly easy.

The photo is still up in the hallway outside the art department.

I walk past it twice a week on the way to my morning lecture. every time I think about telling someone and every time I decide the secret is better.

some things you just keep for yourself.