Flipping through a stack of black and white postcards near the register at Shaman Drum Bookshop, you come across vintage portraits of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf - and then suddenly - a faded shot of two naked men leaning over the passenger side window of an Ann Arbor cop car. But it's not a pornographic gag tossed in to shock the stuffy literary postcard collector - it's a Harvey Drouillard.

Drouillard earned his reputation in Ann Arbor in the spring of 1994 for photographing nude models in front of city landmarks.

That year, Harvey rented out a part of his large downtown apartment to a nude photography workshop. On a whim, Harvey borrowed manual camera and a roll of film to shoot during Hash Bash. He got addicted.

"Its such an adrenaline buzz," said Harvey of shooting nudes in public. "You never forget it."

Drouillard, now a professional photographer who has shot in more than 22 North American cities, still lives and works in Ann Arbor. Models are mostly local volunteers - sometimes students - who average around 24 years old.

"It started at the strangest time," Drouillard said, referring to the onset of his career. Mid-1990s Ann Arbor was the focus of negative media attention due to a rise in violent crime, he said.

"The city saw (my project) as a positive thing," he said. On his website, Drouillard maintains the artistic goal he set at the time: "To make people smile."

It's also to see how much he can get away with.

According to a 1998 Metro Times article that followed a Drouillard shoot, the process went something like this: a car pulled up in front of a local hangout. A clothed young woman stepped out. With a flash of hand signals and quick shouts, Drouillard instructed the girl to drop trou and hit a pose. Drouillard snapped a couple of shots, the girl redressed, and they hopped back into the car and drove away - all in a matter of seconds.

Early shoots were sporadic. Drouillard would pick locations as he walked with models. For his recent work, Drouillard scopes out the location, does practice runs and coordinates hand signals with models in advance.

Drouillard said people's reactions to the shot are often more interesting than the models themselves. Most people around the shoot don't seem to notice, he said.

And the ones who do often seem to ignore it.

"People's true manners come out when something really bizarre happens," he said.

Drouillard is still considering doing a massive nude shoot in Michigan Stadium. He's been rethinking the idea. "The world record is 63,000 nude people in one shot," he said. "It would make history."

Mary Wilcop