Andrew Einhorn’s “Naked Happy Girls”: Putting The Happy Back In Naked

"This is the greatest day in the history of the world," said photographer Andrew Einhorn when the first happy girl he knew agreed to be a naked happy girl. The second season of Einhorn's these-are-the-people-in-your-neighborhood-but-nude series, "Naked Happy Girls," is playing on Playboy TV.

Read more about how Happy is the new Sexy after the gap.

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Einhorn was a fashion photographer and photojournalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 90's, around the time he started working up the courage to ask women to get naked and jump up and down on beds for him.

"I thought, 'I'd rather just shoot these models naked; it'll be so much more fun.'"

When he moved to New York and needed to figure out the city, Einhorn parlayed his natural extrovertedness into a public access cable TV show that featured everything from dog shows to girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines (and this was before "The Man Show").

"I had the need to document my life," he said. "And infatuations became part of it."

Einhorn began by photographing friends, then developed a series of skills to approach strangers.

"I'd ask about their ethnicity or their clothes," he said. "I always worry about coming off creepy. But I'd race to find common ground, like an ultra-fast psychological revolution."

Einhorn says that most of the women he's photographed have said that being naked in front of a camera was something they've always wanted to do, "they just needed someone to open a door."

The second season of "Naked Happy Girls," now set in San Francisco (the photos of Ashlee, Penny and Chrissy, Ruby, and Sandra were all shot in the Bay Area), finds Einhorn getting the same results as in last season's New York: "Three Nos for every Yes."

So what is the value of a smile, especially when it seems like a lot of nude photography or porn features models that are angry, victimized, depressed, and sullen?

"It must be a fetish that hasn't been named," he said. "Like the 'I can step on you and break your balls' or something fetish."

Do the naked girls ever smile too much?

"Yes," he said, "and sometimes when I ask them to ratchet down the smile, the pendulum shifts the other way, and they start to look bitchy. Then I say, 'Go back up again!' I think the smile is the most honest."

· Naked Happy Girls (nakedhappygirls.com)
· Playboy TV (playboytv.com)