Naked Washington sprang from a pair of vendettas: theirs and mine.
In early 2002, the Department of Justice purchased $8,000 curtains to cover an Art Deco statue whose aluminum breast was stealing Attorney General John Ashcroft’s thunder during press conferences.
Their vendetta: a misguided crusade against crumbling morality.
I took it personally. The curtains sounded like a burka to me—an emblem of repression that the U.S. had just spent American lives to defeat. Now my own government was practicing the same paranoid censorship. And using my tax dollars to do it!
So I flew to Washington and photographed every naked statue I could find. The goal was a book to embarrass Ashcroft and his prune-lipped fellow censors.
My vendetta: a misguided crusade against crumbling morality.
But a strange thing happened on the way to retribution. I remembered how often my contact with political opposites forces me to re-examine my own views. Sometimes I defend my views successfully, and sometimes I have to abandon them because I realize that they are not defensible.
It turns out that debate, like nudity, can be healthy.
My new hope is that this book doesn’t embarrass Ashcroft or his friends. I hope that it challenges them to defend their opinions, or abandon them if they can’t.
The author tries out Ashcroft's shoes
