This book of 145 photographs of male and female nudes ponders an ancient question posed by many philosophers, poets, and writers, ranging from Plato to Leonard Cohen: what is beauty? Their musings are represented in 87 quotations that accompany the images.

The author, Bernis von zur Muehlen, writes:
“The idea of beauty as it relates to the human body is as ancient as
Greece, where the Body Beautiful was celebrated in art and sports. The
Greeks believed the body—male and female—to be a reflection of one’s
virtue, and that maintaining one would further the other.
Western art, largely representing the male gaze upon the female
body, has a been a source of celebration as well as anxiety arising from
an unresolved conflict between religious piety and natural sexuality.
Camille Paglia once wrote that “Beauty is our weapon against
nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion.
Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.” I disagree. Beauty is
how we make peace with nature and how we organize what we see. The
beauty we express is a reflection of an order already formed in our minds.
My photographs are neither idealization in the Greek sense, nor—
hopefully—banal representations of the male and female, but distillations
over many years of my longstanding view that the human body can be
beautiful in infinitely many and possibly even contradictory ways.
For this book, I have taken quotes on beauty pondering the nature of
beauty—beauty as revealed to our eye, and beauty in the abstract—by
artists, philosophers, novelists, poets, song writers, entertainers, and even
scientists, and linked them with my photographs of the nude.”