During the European summer of 2023 I had the absolute privilege of heading to Switzerland for the first time in my life. Switzerland is somewhere I had dreamed of going for sometime. Being from NZ, a country renowned worldwide for being one of the most scenic parts of the world, you might think that I wouldn’t be impressed by more mountains and lakes, but you’d be utterly wrong.
Sacha Saxer and I had been planning on working together for quite some time. We’d done a few remote shoots and I got to learn pretty quickly that he was a hiking and nature enthusiast, like myself. So Sacha promised to take me to some of the most stunning spots that he knew of, for my debut modelling tour of Switzerland. Sacha was keen for us to do three days of shooting together. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t looking great for our first day (and there’s safety precautions we must take when going up into the alps and modelling nude!)
So, for the first day Sacha showed me around his neighbourhood and Zurich city. This first blog post will be about our first day (as we got so many awesome pictures over the three days, I feel it needs to be split into 2 parts).
So here we go, Day 1 Part 1 of my shooting adventures with Sacha, begins with a simple “walk around the neighbourhood” aka some beautiful forest and fields up the road. We essentially stroll up the hill and after a while come to a beautiful forested trail. Everything is lush and green, and there are a few funny things along the road, like these witchy looking classic Swiss gnomes, looking like something from a fairytale…we find random spots off the trail to shoot a few shots here and there.
Part 2: From here we walk a while, longer, climb some extremely steep and surely illegal staircase to see a view over the town, grab some lunch and then head back down toward the house. We go past some beautiful fields, and cows and gorgeous houses with lush gardens. On the way, we stop at a lush vineyard on a slopey hill. We shoot some beautiful work here with the rain lightly pouring on us (if you look closely in some of the images you might see raindrops falling). We got cut short slightly by an angry teacher appearing at the bottom of the hill yelling at us in Swiss-german that we can’t shoot nudity next to a school! Apparently we were shooting our art in the sight of a school while they had lunch break, so we moved swiftly along…woops!
You may have also noticed some small cuts covering my body. The day before we shot I was working with a photographer in Lausanne, who had asked if I could lay down on this particularly sharp grass. I knew I felt uncomfortable after laying down a while, but it wasn’t until I had gotten back to Sacha’s place where I was staying, that I looked in the mirror and noticed cuts all over my back and sides! I was utterly shocked, and showering was extremely painful. Luckily Sacha was still game to shoot despite this, and we still created beautiful work.
So, next up we headed into the city to this cool metal structure with leaves and vines growing around it that Sacha knew of. Since it was raining on and off all day, this was a place we could go with a little shelter, and due to the weather there weren’t so many people around the city. The hard metal, angles and mixture of urban + nature provided a totally different feeling and a playground for me to play with different shapes and attitudes. Here is some of what we did. I love the black and white as it allows us to really focus on the textures and sharp angles at play. I say this because Sacha gave me approval to edit these photos in my own style, knowing that I also enjoy photography and editing. I deliberately left in the majority of the cuts and imperfections on my skin, as I liked the rawness of this.
Well, that’s about it for Day 1 of my adventures with Sacha in Switzerland.
I hope you enjoyed reading and viewing! You can find Sacha’s work here: https://www.instagram.com/s.saxer_photography/
If you enjoyed, please feel free to consider supporting me so I can share more of my work with the world here. I prefer it this way to Patreon/Onlyfans, where people can donate what they can, when they can.
You can donate as little as a cup of coffee here, or more if you’re feeling generous! My birthday is coming up! Donate at the following link: