Photography and Text by Tony Ward, Copyright 2017
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DIARY: ROOFTOP WITH A VIEW OF BEAUTY
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It was an unusually clear and cheerfully sunny day in Amsterdam when I called upon a local modeling agency that I was working with to cast models for an upcoming book project. The agency sent over a 21 year old Dutch beauty for the casting. After a brief talk with the new subject in my apartment, we proceeded up a crawl space via a narrow set of wooden stairs to the rooftop of the building that overlooked the Warmoesstraat, a bustling street in the Red Light district of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, loaded with tourists from all walks of life as they window shopped for prostitutes who were legally selling sex for a fee down on the famous street below. Fortunately, the roof of my apartment was on the top floor of a street that ran perpendicular to the Warmoesstraat. The model and I felt secluded from the hustle and bustle of the neighborhood teeming with sex seekers even though one could easily here the constant negotiations that were underway by the tourists who were soliciting the “window girls” down below.
Dutch women in general seem to be more comfortable with their beauty and sexuality as was the case with this lovely young native who innocently laid on a steel girder that was often used by tenet’s in our building to hoist large pieces of furniture up to and through the windows of the old apartment complex. The small winding staircases so common to Dutch apartment dwellings in this section of town made it nearly impossible to deliver large pieces of furniture into the comfort of one’s home without the use of a hoist and a large open window. On this day the girder served a much more noble purpose. The locals in the vicinity who lived in taller apartment buildings benefited by the castings that took place on my rooftop on days when the weather put everyone in the neighborhood at ease, and in the mood to enjoy the simplest pleasures of man and his irresistible nature to enjoy beauty.
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