"You would still go to their eyes"

We can watch someone get gunned down on primetime and thrown off a building and stabbed 15 times but god forbid we see a nipple."

"No one's saying supermodels aren't beautiful, but you don't have to be that way to be beautiful," he says. "How many more ads can we see with essentially the same person?"

Olivia LaVecchia writes about Matt Blum and his wife Katy Kessler, who have created the Nu Project, which explores the art of female nudity.

When Blum started the Nu Project in 2005, his full-time gig was as a Catholic youth minister. Eventually he figured he had to talk to his boss, the priest, about the work he was doing on the side.

"I was like, 'Uh, I need to tell you this, because someone's going to find out,'" Blum remembers. "So I pulled up some images, and he was like, 'I don't want to look.' I said, 'Trust me.'

"I showed him," Blum remembers. "And he said, 'I think it's fine. You're not doing anything disrespectful.'"

But Blum was also frustrated with what he saw as poorly done nude photography. Everything he encountered was either idealized or sexualized.

These days, people's primary exposure to depictions of naked, or nearly naked, women comes mostly in the form of porn stars and supermodels, explains Mary Vavrus, a University of Minnesota professor who studies gender in the media.

"The very, very, impossible to achieve nudes are typically what we see," Vavrus says. "Only 1 percent of the human race is capable of achieving that standard naturally, and body image research over the years has shown that when women encounter the mainstream images of women using this beauty standard, they feel depressed and dissatisfied."

To Blum, the standard isn't just unsatisfying — it's boring.

"No one's saying supermodels aren't beautiful, but you don't have to be that way to be beautiful," he says. "How many more ads can we see with essentially the same person?"

"I was getting sick of it," Blum says.

His personal style was less about elaborate staging or lights, and more about capturing an expression. So he decided to apply the same approach to shooting nudes.

"Normally in a photograph of someone who's clothed you go straight to their eyes, but if someone's not wearing clothes you go straight to their body," says Blum. "My goal was to make photographs where, even if they're not wearing clothes, you would still go to their eyes."

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