Marketa:
Freedom to be me

PHOTOGRAPHY | PETTER HEGRE       WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

Markéta is the epitome of the New Nude; modelling is her passport to the world, the money that provides freedom from worrying about money, but she remains rooted in Hradec Kralove, the small Czech town of her birth, and doesn't allow assignments, be it on catwalks or for magazines, to interfere with her tudies at university.

That beguilinglook in Markéta's eye is intelligence: she's in the midst of a degree course in economy and marketing, and clearly has great admiration for her brother Roman, a security expert who got his masters in information technology last summer and now runs a successful web design company.

Markéta is aware that she is only able to live the way she chooses in today's Czech Republic after generations when freedom of thought, travel and enterprise were restricted. But she is aware, too, that with freedom comes the responsibility to make the most of your own life.

'Here there are a lot of skilful people who can catch time by the forelock,' she says in her appealingly eccentric English. 'We are full members of the European Union and our time will come.'

You get the feeling that Markéta Bêlonohá's time has come, that it is here, and apart from worrying about terrorists and poor government at home, she will achieve her ambition to live a full and happy life. 'I want to travel the world, but in about ten years I would like to have a house full of children and a warm-hearted husband.'

That's the future. In the now, Markéta radiates the joy of being. She packed in trips to the Hegre studio in Paris during the spring vacation and another to the Algarve in August in order to return to her studies with an all-over tan, the image of her naked on the beach defining in a sense her own destiny: she is light on her feet, ethereal, impossible to pin down, her fate in her own hands.