Bash Compactor: Snow Bunnies

"I see a bunch of crazy white people with nothing to do," Ron of Vice magazine’s
"Hey Ron" advice column told me as he gazed into a gigantic photo of
naked beauties cavorting in the snow. The photo was part of snowboarder
extraordinaire Jim Managan’s Winter’s Children exhibit, which opened at Milk Studios last weekend.

Despite
the bitter cold, a line wound down the block. Inside the gallery,
pretty young things in the hippest of clothes and gigantic glasses
cavorted with skinny dudes sporting beards and scraggly hair. "Why does
everyone look the same?" asked my companion, a transplant from North
Carolina who had only been in New York three months. Damned if I knew,
but at least there were three well-stocked and uncrowded open bars!

The
heavily bundled crowd presented a sharp contrast to the photo subjects,
as the series featured copious amounts of naked snowboarding and other
winter hijinks.

Mangan,
a welcoming dude if I’ve ever met one, was happy to share his
inspiration. "I wanted to get back to why I started snowboarding," he
said. "Not that I started off snowboarding naked, but I wanted to get
over the commercialism and the business side, strip it of all the
consumerism."

I
inquired as to whether some of the male subjects felt sheepish due to
the cold weather, and he said that after his 6-foot 5-inch, bearded and
wild-haired accomplice, photographer Peter Sutherland, dropped trou, everyone else followed suit.

And
that’s a great thing, because the crowd’s reaction to the nudity was
overwhelmingly positive. "One thing I do like about it is the hard
nipples," noted Vice’s Ron. "I just wish she was more excited about me than the snow."