Rhett Butler has been photographing nudes since 1978.  For Butler, the nude has been his particular way to strive toward both formal brilliance and emotional expression.  Influenced more by his background in classics than any single photographer, Butler approaches photography philosophically: "I want to discover, through my lens, a psychology of the body, and capture that peculiar point where the fixity of nakedness and the fluidity of emotion collide."

These photographs, seen initially as a series of formal compositions, exude a complicated emotional undertow.  In  No. 1, a woman appears to wear water as an evening gown.  With her hair drawn up in a chignon, and her chin inclined delicately, as if perhaps she were pausing to whisper a secret to the viewer, she looks beloved and familiar.  The picture has an air of intimate restraint. And then, as we look closer, her features blur; the water appears to wash them away.  The woman herself seems to float off into the foam, and  with it, the intimacy we might have felt with her.  It is a kind of emotional tension that Butler probes.  Even at the height of eroticism, Butler's nudes suggest that the body remains mysterious, veiled, and barred from formal consumption, even the shutter of the camera.