Part 2: How I got here

So after a lot of thought and consideration I decided that yes I wanted to take female nude photographs.  My mind started to run through the people I knew and whom I thought would be a "great model."  I immediately thought of my friend Alyse. I asked her to participate in my photography project before I had even really defined it and she agreed.  

I was unconsciously thinking of the "ideal" body type I wanted to portray: thin, toned, well proportioned... and then I realized I was falling into the same trap as our mass media, the mass culture that thin is the ideal, that that beauty lies in how much you weigh or if you are a size 2 jeans.  And I said to myself that's crap! I can't do that!  All that I struggle against by raising my daughter to have a healthy self esteem, a healthy body image, there was no way I was going to portray nude females that were only the  "perfect" body size.  What kind of message would that send to my daughter?

Not wanting to step into that, I thought about my friends (who are mostly moms) and their different body types and one night I was in the shower and it came to me!  MOTHER'S bodies.  With all of the perfections and imperfections that a woman sees in herself and her body after having a child.  I thought about focusing my work on specific body parts, and relating them to body image. 

Did I want to focus on the mother's body as a temple, a shrine to honor and worship and represent that visually as an idol, or did I want to portray it as truth and reality?  I also wondered about portraying the sexuality and sensuality of a woman after having children.  I also thought about confronting the stereotypical, maybe even perhaps mythological housewife/mother lounging around, half naked eating bons bons on the sofa. 

So I presented some of these ideas to my professor and she was intrigued by the idea.  So off I went to shoot my first mom, my friend Rachelle. I photographed her in her living room by her big picture window, using her white curtains as a large softbox. I took about a 30 minutes to get the photos I wanted and had a great conversation with her. The next step was editing them and printing them for the following week's critique which I will talk about in the next few posts. The following week's critique was something completely new to me and to the rest of the class.  We were to have an internationally known photographer come to our class for several sessions to critique our work and perhaps help us with our portfolios. yikes!