Photographing St. Pete: The guerilla approach

It’s all about getting “the shot.”

Photographer Harvey Drouillard specializes in pictures of nude people in public places – incongruous, certainly; illegal, no. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, such things are only obscene if they are sexual in nature, or lack “any serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” The nudes can’t linger for any amount of time, and they most definitely cannot be intoxicated.

There can’t be any children in the vicinity, either.

Drouillard, who’s been staging guerilla nude photo shoots since 1994, knows the rules well, and he adheres to them faithfully. His work is meant to be humorous (“the more you smile, the longer you live,” he says) and artistic, and there’s a certain amount of civic pride involved: He’s logged more than 150 bare tableaus in St. Petersburg, where he’s lived full-time since 2018, all of them staged in front of recognizable public landmarks, including the Pier, the Dali Museum, the Palladium Theater and the steps of City Hall.

The Michigan native, who has photographed in 36 American cities, shows and sells prints of his work in St. Pete galleries, and online. His milieu is black and white, but he sometimes puts the photos on large canvases and adds splashes of color. The large prints are extremely popular, and he sells a lot of St. Pete calendars.

Drouillard displays a photograph of today’s objective.

Tuesday morning, Drouillard gathered a group of volunteers in a closed-off second floor room of a downtown restaurant. Object: Very, very fast photography.

Nine women had volunteered for his latest shoot, at the massive “Sun on the EDGE” sculpture, located in the roundabout at Central Avenue and 11^th Street.

Four men committed to posing too, Drouillard said, but none of them showed up at the appointed hour. They chickened out. “That happens a lot,” he frowned.

Still, there was work to be done, “history to be made,” he told his models, and after each had signed a consent form, they were schooled in stealth, secrecy and stripping. And smiling for the camera.

The women had been instructed to wear tube dresses, which can be removed at a moment’s notice, and sandals or flip flops. (Men’s dress code, not needed this time out, calls for elastic shorts and simple shirts that can be easily pulled over the head.)

A volunteer security team, both woman and men, would be staked out on streetcorners, watching for families and curious police (no one’s going to get arrested, but who needs the hassle?)

Watching out for kids is always the first instruction.

“Once it starts, it starts,” Drouillard told his volunteers. “Because the last thing a family with children wants to hear from a nude person is ‘I’m sorry.’ Like ‘I was doing something wrong, I’m sorry.’ You just do it. There’s no reaction, you’re not doing anything wrong. That’s part of the mental training.”

Then came a training session in kamikaze clothes-dropping. “Drop, take a couple of steps forward,” Drouillard explained. “And when you go back, walk backwards, step over your clothes and pull them up. Don’t bend over; take the time to bend your knees. We’re going for smoothness. That’s where speed comes from.”

He timed them with a stopwatch. The record, set during one of his earlier St. Pete shoots, is 5.2 seconds from dressed to undressed. Tuesday’s assemblage came close.

Next, they were taught the three poses required: One from the rear (a “sun worship” look, arms outstretched, facing the sculpture) and two good-natured full frontals.

Entrance and exit strategies had been worked out like a covert military operation.

If all goes according to plan, he told them, the whole procedure would be over before anyone realized what had happened. He’d worked out, with military precision, entrance and exit routes for the women and their security detail.

“When you’re out there, don’t talk about it,” Drouillard explained. “You’re like ‘Oh my God, we’re going to get naked right over there!’ While you’re on a sidewalk standing in front of a waitress, who goes ‘What did I just hear?’ It happens all the time. And then everybody’s got their phones out. People will try to get their phones out, but usually it’s done too fast. The only people that get it somehow knew before.”

When the moment finally arrived, it was businesslike. Almost anticlimactic. Drouillard’s road-tested rules worked perfectly, and Operation Roundabout – with Drouillard shooting from the bed of a clandestine pickup truck – came off without a hitch.

The clothes were off and on again, with all three desired poses photographed, in just under 30 seconds.

Three or four minutes later, everyone – models, security team and photographer – were back at headquarters, talking about what an adrenaline rush it had been.

Back at headquarters.

“I wasn’t all about taking my clothes off in public,” laughed Lili Sheedy, who modeled alongside her partner, Jennifer King. “She talked me into it. You’re on a busy street, in the middle of a busy city, and – totally sober – you drop your clothes! It’s just a really cool experience.

“And it was the most liberating thing that I’ve ever done.”

Besties Melinda Blum, left (a first-timer) and Summer Henderson (a Drouillard veteran).

Added King: “I knew Harvey from way back, when he hung out in front of Ringside Cafe, selling his art. And I always wanted to be in a shot, but if he’d asked me I would been a little bit skeptical.

“But then 10 years later, we were out walking and we walked by his art gallery. And I said ‘You’ve got to check this out; this guy is really good.’” They asked him how they could get involved.

“The people that want to be in the picture,” Drouillard said, “are the only ones who ask the question ‘How do you find people to do this? Can anybody do it?’ Then they’re in.”

Above: Setting up “the shot.” Below: The sun worship pose. Images taken from a security team video.