This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.“There was no nude calendar with people I actually found sexy,” said photographer Lara Verheijden once told us. That’s why, back in 2019, she created the first edition of the Amsterdamse NaaktKalender (Amsterdam Naked Calendar), in collaboration with stylist Mark Stadman.
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The concept is simple: Verheijden finds people on Instagram willing to pose nude or partially nude in public and takes beautiful pictures of them in different spots of Amsterdam. The calendar’s first edition was a runaway success, and she’s since produced two more editions and added a Berlin offshoot.In 2022, Verheijden decided to do a special version of the calendar at Lowlands, one of the biggest festivals in the Netherlands, which takes place every year in late August.Festival director Eric van Eerdenburg was already a fan of Verheijden’s work, so the entire site became a photoshoot set. “He gave me carte blanche,” Verheijden says. “The fact that I didn’t have to be secretive was exciting, it turned the shoot into a performance. You have a crowd of people around you, looking on.”
The cover.
The Lowlands crowd reacted very differently from city residents. “In the Netherlands, passersby usually just crack a joke,” Verheijden remembers. “In Berlin, they just watched shamelessly, which was so inappropriate.” At the festival, onlookers were very sweet and chilled about it. “They said things like, ‘It’s really cool you’re doing this’, and that stood out to me,” Verheijden adds. “There’s some kind of agreement, a sense of solidarity, like on a school trip. To me, that’s why people keep going back. You’re a part of something bigger.”
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June.
The calendar follows the timeline of the actual festival – January opens with pictures of the line to get in and December closes with a self-portrait of the photographer at the totally trashed campsite. As a self-confessed “non-festival goer”, Verheijden took inspiration from photos of the iconic 1969 Woodstock festival, as well as its notorious 1999 do-over. People didn’t really pose in pictures of the original Woodstock, Verheijden notes. “They’re very observational images, there’s something very sweet and poetic about them,” she says. “That’s how I got the idea of taking a lot of pictures using a zoom lens, like the one on the cover. You want to see the crowd, you want to feel that people are there.”
September.
The calendar also includes lots of cheeky references to religious ecstasy, including a picture of a woman catching a ray of sunshine as she steps out of her tent. “It’s like a vision of the Virgin Mary – that’s what my gallerist Paul van Esch said about it,” Verheijden says.But one of the most unexpected key themes of the calendar is its sheer Dutch-ness. “Everything at Lowlands is arranged down to the last detail, which is really different, especially compared to Woodstock of ‘99,” she said. “You don’t see exhausted people laying around. At Lowlands, people do that in their own tents with an avocado smoothie.”