Now you see them, now you don't! Artist creates stunning pictures that make naked models blend with the background

• Lensman turns 'the skin into a canvas' with pictures of made-up models in stark American landscape

When most of us take pictures for the family album we want to be able to recognise who is in the shot.
But photographer Jean-Paul Bourdier has dedicated his time to making his subjects look like they are not even there.
In these remarkable snaps bodies are painted to mimic backdrops of deserts and snow-covered fields.

The hills are alive! Jean-Paul Bourdier's painted ladies peak at the mountains

This pair were boulder-ed over by the stunning scenery

They couldn't see the wood for the trees, now they are the new forest

The Frenchman, who lives in Berkeley, California, has spent has spent the last 15 years taking pictures in the American West.
He was inspired by seeing that there was 'no separation between the universe and myself.'

 

Jean-Paul, a professor at Berkeley, said: 'I scarcely see the final result large enough to enjoy it. Only when I make large prints do I enjoy them.
'For me, turning the skin into a canvas for the imagination is both an artistic and a spiritual endeavour.

Sometimes we all need a moment to reflect

Never again would the husbands be trusted with the sunblock.

What a way to get a precipice of the action

He claimed the painted look transformed the body 'into a living sculpture, lit up by its godly colours'  that could reach its potential 'to tune in or become an extension of the cosmos.'

'As I conceive it, skin painting marks a person's external appearance while also bringing out the inner self,' Jean-Paul said.
'They put us in contact with nature and with the raw, at the same time, they turn us into non-natural beings, opening the way to experience the invisible or the unknown.

Spot the difference - looking out over the desert

What's black, and white, and red all over? Not these two, they are a little blue.

Jean-Paul sets up his models for the perfect picture.

The professor daubs his model in blue paint to match the sky

'Body and earth are one. If the body is seen from the back, the front becomes an open field, a place that cannot yet be identified, a place of possibilities.
'In working with the bare and painted body, I am also working with the demands and challenges of a body-mind state that I call, "not two-many twos."
'For example, without clothes the body regains its undivided primary nature, being intricately part of the forces of the universe, it is no longer estranged from the environment nor split into an upper and a lower part.'
'The visual works I come up with are a continual study of how we physically, rhythmically relate to this universe from the specific, intimate bodyhouse.'