Senior pictures are something meant to capture a moment in time, a keepsake to mark a teenager's crossing of the threshold from high school into college, from teenage angst into the equally angsty era of the early 20s.

As such, many look for the perfect setting to make an image that will adorn their parent's fridge for years. Jillian Henry, a 17-year-old soon-to-be senior at South Eugene High School, was likely doing just that when she sought out the serene setting of the coast fork of the Willamette River near Mount Pisgah on Saturday.

It was just her and her photographer, friend Elena Nesbit, snapping away when all of a sudden a curious beast emerged from the brush.

It was a man, a naked man, and his dog splashing about on the far bank of the river.

The ensuing pictures, posted with the simple caption "love my senior pics [?] ," have since gone viral, garnering more than 21,000 retweets and 66,000 likes since the tweet went out Sunday.

"I posted it and was super excited when it got to just a few hundred favorites, and then I went swimming and was out of cell service for a couple hours and when I got back into service it was at a few thousand and just kept getting more and more," she told The Oregonian/OregonLive by text on Monday. "I never expected it to get that big."

The sudden internet fame caught Henry a little off guard.

"It's kinda crazy when you think about how many people have seen that picture of you and that's it's a topic of conversation across the country," she said, but added that all the replies have been "pretty positive."

Perhaps Henry's tweet going viral is proof that all it takes to be popular on the internet is a little gratuitous flesh or perhaps it shows that people really appreciate the human form and can cull joy from seeing it displayed in its natural habitat.

We may never know.

— Kale Williams

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