Strategic Placement

I have seen pictures with "strategic placement" of objects for as long as I can remember. Those are the pictures you see where it's obvious that the person is naked but the important bits are covered. Not all instances of strategic placement were for obfuscating nudity--many times they were just blocking something for copyright or privacy reasons. Even the nude shots weren't always actual nudity. They were instead "implied nudity," meaning the objects that were used to cover the person's private areas were often big enough that there could have easily been shorts or a bikini top under there. Hollywood has used a guitar for such a covering for years. Remember the Peter Sellers movie that had him wandering around wearing a guitar at a nudist park? Or how about this Herb Alpert album cover? What was under that whipped cream? Was anything under that whipped cream? I fantasized over this one many times as a kid.

Advertising has been using this form of attention-getting for decades. It wasn't unusual to see full nudity many years ago when our media was in its infancy, but enough public outcry over the naughty imagery forced the FCC to put the stops on that. From then on "thoughtful product placement" won over.

In the world of nudism, the winner for strategic product placement goes to World Naked Gardening Day. There are tons of pictures with clever positioning of watering cans or wheelbarrows. Those are all fairly easy to execute. The hard ones have got to be videos. I can't imagine how many tries it would take to get all the bits to come out just right. "Cut! I saw a nipple there again."

Here's an entertaining little commercial from Cricket Wireless:

I don't speak Spanish, but I can kind of figure out what's going on in this KFC commercial. This one probably required a few takes to get just right... it's pretty close!

Lots of times people take strategic placement pictures just so they can include their shot in more places and reach a wider audience. For example, isn't this a fun shot? How could it possibly offend anyone? It's just wholesome, grandmotherly-looking ladies enjoying a nice time out in a local eatery!
Even Facebook couldn't say anything against such a wholesome group of people if they're not showing anything.

Let's round it all up with a couple of related cartoons. I love cartoons. I wish there were more of them in the nudism vein...