Volume 3, Issue 5 – October, 2000

Laurie Edison: Respecting the Beauty of Diversity

How do you define “fat?” Laurie Edison sees “fat” and “thin” as simply different points on the continuum of human beauty. Thirty years as a jeweler and sculptor refined the vision she brings to her photographs, and the radiant, unexpected nudes of her first collection of photographs, Women En Large, make it hard to question her judgment.

Not content with broadening the definition of “beautiful,” five years ago Edison decided to tackle a more challenging artistic question: “What is masculine?” The resulting work in progress, Familiar Men, offers some surprising answers. From Denmark to New York to Tokyo and all points in between it appears that individuals who learn to see beauty in the everyday ultimately come to appreciate the beauty in themselves.

Crescent Blues: Tell us a little about how you got interested in the project that became Women En Large?

Laurie Edison: Debbie Notkin, who wrote the text for Women En Large, is a very close friend of mine, and we were having coffee — quite a few years ago. Debbie is not a woman who cries easily, but she was very upset and in tears. Someone who she worked with professionally, who she also considered a friend, had written in a small magazine that it would be his nightmare to go to a nudist colony and see a 300-pound woman without her clothing on. As a fat woman, Debbie was really upset by this. And I said what I tend to say, which is, “Why don’t we do something about it?”

What we ended up doing was a series of a series of workshops for the professional universe she and this man both worked in called “On Fat and Feminism.”

I was the “token skinny.” When people start talking about medical issues, for example, if someone my size says the popular medical information is lies, it’s a lot more convincing to some people, because there’s no way they can tell me that I’m rationalizing it. So basically I was on panels with a group of fat women.

We did this for several years, and I started looking at the women with my artist’s eye. And I realized that not only were they very beautiful, but that their beauty was much more varied than the beauty of thin women. I also realized that in the 20th century this certainly was not a beauty which had been really expressed.

Since I was already a sculptor, I made a few small sculptures of fat women, and the individual pieces worked out beautifully, but they just weren’t sufficient for the overall message I was trying to convey. So I decided to do photographs and, since we’re both involved in social change work, Deb and I decided to do a book.

And how did you go about finding women who were willing to pose for the book?

That turned out to be very easy. We expected that finding women to pose for the book would be difficult. The first person I photographed for the book, therefore, was Debbie. And indeed, the cover photograph on the book is from that very first shoot. But as soon as women saw those pictures, I had absolutely no problem getting women to be photographed. People were calling me up and either telling me they were interested or telling me about someone they know whom they thought would be wonderful.

We had to do a fair amount of diversity outreach, which was extremely important to us — especially since we knew this was probably going to be the first book of its kind, which it was. And unfortunately, in this country, it’s still pretty close to the only book of its kind.

There could be many books out there, but they certainly haven’t gotten anywhere near as much notice.

No, there are not many books out there. That I would know, because there is a community that’s interested in this.

And they’d have found them.

I only know about one other respectful book of fat nudes — which I think is very unfortunate. And it was published overseas and it’s very expensive. But in any case, because of that, it was very important to us that as many fat women as possible see themselves in the book. And that, of course, meant all ages, all sizes, all colors.

Was there anyone you photographed who for whatever reason changed her mind afterwards?

No, no one I’ve photographed had any real second thoughts whatsoever. Well, that’s not quite true — no one had any second thoughts that they communicated to me.

They were probably a little nervous, though.

Everyone who did this was brave. Many women I photographed were very nervous. It isn’t like everybody decided to do this and was any more at ease and comfortable than women of any size who are not professional models would be about being photographed in the nude. But everyone who decided to do it decided that they liked the work, they liked the politics, and they felt the book was important. I did photograph a few people who simply enjoyed being photographed and had some professional modeling experience, but 90 percent of the women I photographed had never been models in any way and certainly had never been photographed in the nude.

I should add that it’s not as if I go up to people on the street and say, “Pardon me, ma’am, can I take your picture in the nude?”

So how did you spread the word?

A couple of different ways. Initially, I approached either people I knew personally or people whom I met professionally. So, if I saw someone that I wanted to photograph, I usually knew someone who could introduce me to her. Then I would take her out to coffee, show her the work, discuss the project, and give her time to think about it. Some people said “yes” immediately. I asked a friend who’s a photographer herself, and it took her six months to decide. And everything in between. And that was all fine, because I only wanted to photograph women who had given this serious thought and decided they wanted to do it. I think that’s one of the reasons, obviously, that no one changed their mind.

Because you didn’t rush them into it at all.

No, and almost no one I suggested it to took it casually. People took it seriously and thought about it. But as we made the book was we were doing slide shows in a variety of communities — showing people the work — because this was very community-based work. Asking them what was missing from the pictures, what they wanted to see, and how they felt about them. Their answers didn’t have a direct effect in the sense that people would say, “Pose someone in this way,” but they definitely affected the pictures and the text profoundly.

For example, people wanted to see fat women with children, because fat women have children. People wanted to see women doing active things, and so on. And in the process of that, women started coming out of the slide show audiences. I would talk about what was missing, or sometimes it was as simple as women saw women who looked like them in the slides, and that made them feel comfortable. One of the reasons for having that kind of really large variety in your work is that the more you have the more you’ll get.

One thing I liked was that you gave short biographies of the women who had posed. It sounded as if for some of them it was very much in keeping with their other life experiences, while for others it was a very different thing to have done.

Yes, exactly. And the women also came from a very wide variety of class backgrounds, occupations and so on.

Was there anyone who had never heard of [the fat acceptance movement and its relationship with feminism], who learned about these issues through your work with the book?

Yes, there were. One of the reasons we included the biographies was that it was really important to us that the pictures be about real women, not nude models with a capital “M.” And it’s also why I took environmental portraits. They’re respectful portraits of women, and they’re also mostly in the women’s own homes.

Which gives it a much more grounded feeling.

Yes, it gives the viewer much more sense that this is a real person. Where people live tells so much about them. When you see someone in their home, you get much more indication of who they are and also about their history. We build history where we live. So the biographies were very important, and actually, most of the biographies were written by the women themselves. A couple of people would call up Debbie and say, “I really don’t want to write this, can I just tell you a few things?” But basically we asked people to write their own.

What about your reactions? Did you find that the experience of taking the photographs changed you, and if so, how?

It changed me in a number of ways. As an artist and as someone who became a photographer to do Women En Large —

Really?

Yes, basically, I had worked pretty exclusively in metal before that, but it was very clear to me that this work needed to be photographs. So it gave me a profound new art in the middle of my life. An amazing gift. And beyond that, doing this kind of work gives one a far broader vision of what people are like, what bodies are like. The privilege, really, of being able to go and photograph 25 women in their homes in ways that they were comfortable with — I think deeply changed how I perceive the way we live in our bodies.

And more personally, while I am a thin woman and certainly fall within the parameters of conventionally attractive, I’m not a young woman. I’m five years older than I was when Women En Large came out; and ten years older than I was when I started the project. And I doubt if I would be as comfortable and as relaxed about the changes that have come with age if I hadn’t done Women En Large.

So it had a very positive effect for you as well.

Absolutely. And also, this sounds grandiose, but we know from the emails and the letters and the people we have talked with — without question Women En Large has changed thousands of lives. And the power and the effect that this has had to change lives was way beyond our wildest dreams. And that is something I’m just incredibly grateful for. I couldn’t tell you the ways in which it has changed me, but obviously it has.

Now you’re working on a new project, Familiar Men. How did that evolve — was it a natural outgrowth of Women En Large?

It was a natural outgrown of Women En Large, but not one I understood at the time. When I finished Women En Large, I assumed that after I took a little time off and I finished a landscape project I had been collaborating on with a dye transfer photographer, that I was going to go ahead and do another book of female nudes. A different kind of female nudes. This is the only time in my life that I’ve had a plan for what I would do artistically, and I found out that I didn’t want to do it. But in this case, it took me a while to figure out that Women En Large really was my statement about the female nude. And that at least for that point in my life, I was finished with it.

So I turned to Familiar Men with the idea that I was going to take a couple of years to do a book of male nudes and then go on to another project I had in mind. What I didn’t realize when I went into doing a book of male nudes was that it was going to be every bit as profound, and because of the issues involved, in many ways far more complex than Women En Large.

I imagine it made it easier in the case of Women En Large because you were yourself a woman. It would have been a different dynamic with a male photographer.

Actually that’s true, but that’s not the complex part. The difference was that saying that fat women should be on the continuum of beauty is a very radical thing to say, but it’s not a very complicated thing to say. And Women En Large deals with issues of discrimination, issues of beauty, issues around which a social change movement already existed — issues that have been articulated and discussed. Visible issues. Masculinity is something we don’t talk a whole lot about. It’s like air.

It’s just there.

It’s just there, and we accept it. And when I went into doing Familiar Men, we realized that the issue of masculinity is simply much more complex and far less explored. There has been a lot of feminist exploration of women, and when we started this, a very modest amount of discussion of masculinity. It had been more feminism reacting to masculinity, than really discussing it. And when we started — and this is changing, so this is something I feel very good about — men weren’t talking about masculinity, men were simply accepting it. The sea of all this stuff that we swim around in, this dominant culture that really makes the rules, wasn’t really being analyzed at all…or very little. It still is not being discussed a great deal, but in the last five years a conversation about masculinity is definitely emerging, and the work I’m doing is clearly very much at the center of it.

What kinds of issues are emerging as you do the work?

One thing I think is an excellent example of this: men are almost exclusively defined by what they do. When you show someone a book of female nudes, no one ever asks, “I wonder what she does?”

“Is she a lawyer; is she a doctor; is she a housewife?”

No one has ever asked that about any individual photograph in Women En Large. But when you take men’s clothes off, people often literally become confused. Men are so defined by what they do; and what you do and how you fit into the whole structure of things is defined by what you wear. The absoluteness of it really floored us.

Was it something that the models thought as well as the viewer?

No, but I’d show the photographs and people would look at them and ask, “What does he do?” And they would sometimes look at a photograph and try to figure out what someone does or feel uncomfortable because they didn’t know.

And once they knew, they could go on and they could catalogue him.

Yes, because that’s what we tend to do to men.

A profound feeling of discomfort — I can’t put him in his niche.

And it’s very hard on men, all that prioritizing and hierarchy is not a useful thing for human beings.

Another thing was, if you show a female nude from the back — like the ones you see in PG advertising, where the woman is looking over her shoulder — and the picture is cut right above where her buttocks actually start, it still looks like a nude. But if a picture of a man does not have full frontal nudity, people do not consider it a nude. I would show photographs, and people would say, “But he isn’t nude.”

Well, he is; he’s not wearing any clothes.

Right. But if the penis is not in the picture, a lot of people simply do not perceive a man as being nude.

Are you going about finding the men to model for the book in the same way, drawing from people that you know from the community?

And then branching very much out from there. I did not know most of the women I photographed in Women En Large. Although afterwards, of course, I’ve gotten to know them well, because I keep in touch with people about exhibitions, and let them know when their pictures are in magazines or newspapers and so on.

But I didn’t know the majority of the women I photographed in Women En Large. And the same thing is very true for Familiar Men. I try to find people who suit what I’m looking for, but frequently I’m one or two people away from them. I just had an email from someone who said that he had a friend who he thought would be someone I’d be interested in for the book.

One of the things I thought was interesting about Women En Large was the enormous amount of diversity. Not only cultural and racial diversity, but the diversity extended to women who had what we would we normally consider disabilities of various sorts. This is astonishing at first, but then I found myself asking, “Well, why not?” Which I gather is the reaction you’re looking for.

Well, that’s part of showing as many different kinds of people as possible. And of course for Women En Large there was also size — what does society consider fat; how it would start from what one would call mid-size and then would go up.

It could define 90 percent of the female population if you’re rigorous about it.

I could do an entire book of women who defined themselves as fat and only include women who could practically model for the magazines. That’s one of the major problems that we deal with, the obsession with extreme thinness.

Which is not a problem for men.

No.

Are there body images or taboos or similar things that emerge with men? One issue that is as profound for men as size is for women, or a host of issues — in terms of them looking at their bodies and comparing to society’s norms?

That’s an interesting question. I’m still in the middle of this work, so I don’t have a complete answer. Men do express concern over issues of fat and size, but these concerns are not as important to men as they are to women. And I think if I’d been taking these pictures twenty years ago that would have been a lot more true. But the whole commoditization of beauty that women have been dealing with for so long is certainly starting to affect men. All you have to do is look at television advertising to see that.

I think men’s issues are more diverse. What men are concerned with — profoundly — is fitting into this very small box which we call masculinity. Most men try very hard and have a very hard time trying to fit as much of themselves into this box. Because if they don’t, the world says that they’re weak, or they’re women, or they’re queer. I don’t think that this is true of the individual men I photographed as I was photographing them. And when I think about it, most of the fat women I photographed were not grappling with issues of size when I photographed them, so I guess it’s not that dissimilar.

At any rate, what I’m really trying to do in my work is show what men look like out of the box. Because most men are not like that little box, however much they feel forced to squeeze their public personas into it. Out of the box, masculinity becomes much broader, much more complicated, much more diverse. And much more relaxed.

Do you find people have more problems viewing male nudes than female nudes?

No. I find it’s about the same. Because the issue of fat is one of the ultimate taboos. You’re still allowed to make jokes about it, people are still allowed to ridicule fat people in a way that almost nothing else can be ridiculed. And people have really been trained, deeply trained by a multi-billion dollar medical industry, a multi-billion dollar diet industry, and a multi-billion dollar beauty industry, to be really repulsed by fat.

I think people are equally uncomfortable or comfortable, for that matter, with the male nudes, because we’re not supposed to see men out of the box. But by the same token, Women En Large does makes people who really look at the pictures say, “Oh. She does look beautiful.” And that can really change how people see. And I’m getting very much the same reaction when I show the male nude work. It’s kind of, “Yeah, I know men who look like that.” Or men say, “Yes, this is what I look like, and it feels so good to see people like me.” And meanwhile the work is still getting complicated negative reactions, because all of this is new, and evolving.

Do you get negative reactions sometimes?

You mean, do I know there are negative reactions to the work? Sure.

How do you find out about it?

My experience is that when most people see either the fat nudes or the male nudes, and have time to see them either in an exhibition or a book or a slide show, the predominant reaction is positive. Obviously, some people say negative things. Or sometimes I’ll get an unpleasant email. But the portraits I do are designed to catch an essential sense of who the people I’m photographing are, and that has a very different effect on people than conventional nudes.

That are done for erotic reasons.

Yes. I think one of the differences is that people expect women to be willing to pose in the nude. The idea of a woman posing in the nude, even a woman who has never modeled before, may be surprising to people, or very surprising if it’s a fat woman. But the idea that average men are willing to take off their clothes and be photographed is much, much more surprising to people. There is a much more persistent assumption that these must be professional models, some special category of men, because the taboo is so great.

Do you think that people, in a sense, self-select and just turn their heads when they pass the hall where you’re giving the exhibition or when they see the book, if they can’t handle this.

Yes, I do. I also think that reviews clearly self-select. Because Women En Large has gotten about sixty reviews — and I’m not talking about short paragraphs but full-length articles, literally worldwide. And something like 57 of them were incredibly positive. And of the other three, one was trying real hard to like it and just couldn’t manage it. And we got totally blasted by The Sun, one of the major tabloid presses in England. This was in conjunction with an exhibition which included my work, and they also ran one of the photographs with this review that totally trashed my work, the exhibition and everything about it. People saw the photograph and the exhibition was packed.

If you say “beautiful fat woman,” unless you can see a photograph, it sounds like a contradiction in terms. And The Sun ran one of my photographs large, so an awful lot of people clearly looked at the photograph, and ignored the review, and came to the exhibition.

When I say that we get relatively little negative reaction, and I do think it is self-selecting.

People who aren’t ready to look at this —

Don’t want to talk about it. I’ve had the experience of talking, for example, with two people on the same newspaper, and one person just isn’t interested in talking with me at all. And the next person I reach is incredibly interested in the work and wants to know about it. What’s not self-selecting, though is when people see the photographs.

Even if they come with a bit of an attitude.

I think they do. I’ve stood in galleries or in bookstores and literally watched people change their minds. I’ve seen people come into a Women En Large exhibition and start giggling at the first pictures and they’re clearly uncomfortable. Actually I’m thinking of one in San Antonio, Texas, which is quite a conservative place. I just watched the women walk around — they didn’t know I was the artist — and about halfway through they’d start saying, “I know somebody who looks like her.” And by time they were finished they were talking about how good the women looked. That’s really what the work is about.

Also, when we would do bookstore slide shows — and this happened a lot — someone would get up out of the audience and say, “You know, the first time I saw that book, I couldn’t even open it. I just couldn’t. I walked away. And then I came back and I kind of opened it a little bit and looked at a few of the pictures. And decided” — and this was very often fat women — “and decided, you know, these women didn’t look too bad.”

And then she would come back the third time to the slide show and not only realize that the women in the book looked good but realize that she looked good. And we heard this story over and over again. And it’s one of the reasons it’s so important to make a book — because you can do that with a book. You can come back to it, you can see it in a friend’s house — you can see it in lots of therapists’ offices.

Really? Are therapists using it as a tool?

Yes, a lot of therapists and professors are using it, as well as one of the major institutes in human sexuality in Minneapolis. They use slides from Women En Large, among other things, for outreach to women who are HIV positive, because it is positive body image stuff. It’s also being used in various classes in human sexuality just as a way to make people feel comfortable about how people look. I speak at colleges a fair amount, at their request. We’re in a lot of university libraries and a lot of public libraries. That’s something we worked really hard at.

And the book has crossed over very well into the African American community, where it has been very well reviewed. That was also very important to us. We wanted [Women En Large] to get out into as many communities as possible.

I get the distinct feeling that this isn’t the first time you’ve put your art into the service of social change.

Actually, Women En Large was the first time. And I should be very clear about the fact that when I take the pictures, the first thing I’m doing is the art. And then the social change plays into how the art gets used. But when I’m photographing someone, it’s really a combination of the aesthetics of the composition and getting a sense of who they are. I don’t think about social change when I’m photographing people at all.

But it certainly emerges from the collected body of the work.

Also the fact that for both books, text is very important. The text gives framing or context to the work. Otherwise someone could simply say, “These are marvelous pictures and she’s a great photographer,” and dismiss the politics. So it’s very important that the text be there as well, to showcase the issues.

Perhaps the book not only gave you the gift of a new art, then, but a way of combining threads in your life.

I think that’s true. Women En Large emerged from social change work, which I had done before. But having my art and my social change work weave themselves together was absolutely a new thing for me. And one of the really good things about this kind of work is that when you do an interview or you get pictures in a magazine or you make any publicity effort- — every time you do that you’re doing important work.

If I concentrated on landscapes, for example, I’d have to spend at least as much energy on interviews and TV and slide shows and the rest of that, but those wouldn’t pay me back. This way, most of my publicity work feels very good. Because, obviously, it’s about me, but it’s also about the work and it’s about me because I do the work. For example, traditionally magazines and newspapers want to run a picture of the artist, and I always have them run one of my photographs instead. What I look like isn’t very interesting, but people seeing what the nudes look like is what’s going to make them come to the gallery or the event.

So how much longer are you going to be working on the Familiar Men project before the book emerges, or is that indefinite?

There’s going to be a major exhibition of Familiar Men in Japan in November, and Debbie’s and my goal (she’s collaborating with me on the text for this book) is to have it either finished or very close to finished by then. And that is looking good at the moment. The text is going to include small photographs, and be much more integrated with the art than the text was for Women En Large. We’d like to have it almost finished, and I hope the photographs will be finished as well. That will make it about five years; it will end up taking about as long as Women En Large.

And then do you have another project in mind, or are you waiting for one to emerge?

I have another project in mind that I’m not ready to talk about. But once this is finished, there’s going to be the next step, which is getting it seriously out into the world. And after that I’m going to take a long vacation.

Getting the book done is only the first step. Then you have to go out and promote it.

As I said, one of the really good things about the social change aspect of the work is going out and promoting it. Promotion is hard work, and if I could wave a magic wand and stay home in my darkroom, I certainly would. But at least because it’s social change work, mostly the promotion feels really good to do. And also I get a whole different level of feedback on the work. One of the really good things about the kind of work I do is I’m not doing it alone in the corner. I’m very much involved with people and with community.

That’s one aspect that I found very fascinating. You’re not just going and taking a bunch of photos and then putting them there. The exhibitions, the public reaction to the work is very much shaping the work even as you do it.

And when I’m photographing people, in many ways it really is very collaborative. I’m not only shooting people in their homes, I’m also shooting people in ways that they feel comfortable. I don’t pose people. Well, I pose people in the sense that I’ll say “Move your head three inches or put your hand over here.” But I make it very clear when I’m working with people that I only want them to sit or stand in ways that are natural and comfortable to them. I would not be getting the kind of portraits I got if people weren’t really very comfortable and relaxed. Because what I want is what’s natural for that person. And so that part of it is also collaborative and then, as you said, I go out and getting reactions to the work and hear how people feel. That’s very important.

In addition to being a collaboration between you and Debbie, you could call it a multi-part collaboration between you, Debbie and the community that you are working in.

Yes; and actually it’s “communities,” plural. One important thing is that the work is diverse and it really goes to a lot of different communities. It’s one of the things that does make Familiar Men different. The fat activist community was there for Women En Large to begin in and be supported in, while the male nude work, Familiar Men, really cuts across a lot of very different communities, without having one “home community” to focus on. So getting reactions and hearing what people think is more complicated. But very rewarding.

Is photography something you can ever imagine yourself making a living at, or is your jewelry going to continue to do that for a while?

I don’t know. I love doing the jewelry. The jewelry I’ve done has given me freedom. It took me a fair number of years to be able to do exactly the jewelry I want and express myself artistically and make a living from it, but I’ve been successful now for a long time.

And you’re not interested in giving that up.

I’m not interested in giving up the jewelry, and I’m also not interested in going through the process I would have to, to have the same situation with photography.

So it’s a good mix for you now?

Yes. I’d have to do things I wouldn’t like as much in order to support myself with the photography. I do make some money from the photography, and it is becoming an increasing part of my income, but since I really love doing the jewelry, making the photography pay for everything is not a priority. And that’s good for the work.

Since you don’t have to make it pay, you can make it what it needs to be.

Exactly.

How long have you been making jewelry, and how did you get into that?

I’ve been making jewelry…let’s see…thirty years. My grandmother had a jewelry store in Greenwich Village. My family’s goal for my training would have been to make me something far more intellectual. And I’ve always felt very, very fortunate that both with the photography and the jewelry, while I do work with my head a lot, I’m basically a person who works with her hands. I feel very blessed by that.

Getting back to Women En Large, are there aspects of the work that you’d like to cover that we haven’t explored yet?

One of the major things about Women En Large that we didn’t expect was when we asked women to write about their experience being photographed, we figured we’d get a nice variety. Instead, almost everyone wrote about the transformational effect of being photographed, and how profoundly it had made them feel really good about how they looked. And how much that had changed their lives.

Even the people who had been active in the size acceptance movement?

Absolutely, because everything happens by degrees. Being photographed was really an incredibly transformative experience for most of the women. One woman threw out her entire wardrobe. Even women who had been in the size acceptance movement, it moved them up the acceptance scale. Not quite everybody, but certainly the majority.

Similarly, the vast majority of the men I’ve photographed have really liked being photographed. For some it has been transformative, and for some of them it has not been transformative. One of the effects of being in the middle of a project — we didn’t find out the effects on the women who were in Women En Large until the end, so I don’t quite know enough about the different ways it has affected men yet.

Do you think photographs are more successful with the people who do find it a transformative experience?

No, because there are lots of ways of really liking a portrait. One man I photographed looked at it and realized that he was extremely attractive, and he really hadn’t known it before. Seeing their pictures clearly affects the men I’ve photographed. I do know that most of them have really liked how they looked.

Also, I don’t think any more than 10 percent of the women I asked to be photographed for Women En Large said no. That’s an extremely small number. And the very few women who said no, refused because they figured they’d lose their jobs or their pensions. Although one woman who worked for the federal government just went in to her boss and said, “I’ve been asked to pose nude for a book. I would really like to do this. Is this going to affect my job or my pension?” And the government board that makes those basically said, “We would prefer that you don’t do this, but we can’t stop you as long as you don’t use your full name or mention where you work.” And she is, indeed, in the book. At this point, she’s retired.

And her pension is safe.

Well, she was very careful; she got it in writing. Anyway, about 25 percent of the men I’ve asked have turned me down. If I hadn’t done Women En Large, I would think that was a very low number. And it’s always been because they’re afraid it will affect their work. Obviously, the men I have photographed have been every bit as brave as the women I photographed for Women En Large. It’s a very courageous thing to do.

Yes, it would be a rather unusual thing to have coming out at work — unless you work in a very different environment than the majority of people in this world. Earlier today my boss asked me about going to dinner with a group of people from the office, and I said, “No, I can’t go to dinner; I have something planned.” And my boss said, “Oh, anything interesting?” I said yes and explained what I was doing. He got this rather odd look on his face. I said, “I’ll have to let you read the article.” He didn’t seem disapproving or shocked; he just seemed…puzzled.

That’s the whole business about masculinity not being discussed. A woman on Canadian television did a really nice program on me and my work. They came down here and photographed women and men who were in the photographs and filmed me all over the city. She said that when she went back and she was running the tape, people really reacted to it.

They typically were reacting positively, but she had a sense that this was not something people expect to see. When they realize they are seeing really respectful portraits, they have a very different experience. Respectful portraits of people in the nude are something you don’t see at all. Or very rarely.

True. You see loving, affectionate portraits of particular people of whom the photographer or artist is fond. I’m thinking of a photographer who has done very beautiful nude photographs of his wife and toddler. But not of people who are not connected to you.

And of male nudes, there are even less — I was thinking more of male nudes when I said that. But if you took the percentage of female nudes who were portrayed respectfully as real people, as a portion of all the female nudes in the world, the percentage would be miniscule. And certainly we’ve seen far more respectful nudes of women than we have of men.

Which makes me remember another difference between men and women being photographed. Even if individual women are not used to being looked at, women are used to the idea of being looked at.

The idea that as women they are the observed sex.

Yes. And men are not. So when you photograph men, you have an extra component. Most of the men I have photographed have indeed relaxed and been very comfortable, but it is clearly more difficult for men to relax than for women. And I think that one primary reason is that men are simply not accustomed to the idea of being looked at. And, apropos of sex, I think many women are far more comfortable being photographed by a woman, and I think men are also more comfortable.

You think they’d be more uncomfortable if you were a male photographer?

That is something I have heard over and over again. Some from people I’ve photographed, some when I’ve given talks to photographers. And when I’ve talked to groups of photographers — men, primarily, in this case — they’ve pointed out to me how much easier it is for me to do this because I’m a woman. Men, as a group, feel far more judged by other men than they do by women.

Do you think being photographed by a woman lets them stay a little bit in that box?

No, I think it’s the opposite. I think a woman is more apt to photograph a man out of the box, because the masculinity box is really about the reaction of other men.

And having a male photographer there…

Would keep a man more in the box. Clearly, I believe that male photographers could do this. But I think it is overall more comfortable for men to be photographed by a women. Most masculinity stuff is about being evaluated by other men, not primarily by women.

So by being a woman photographer you free them from that pressure…

From some of that pressure.

How do other photographers react to the work?

Overall, very well. Technically, the kind of social change work I do requires me to be a master printer, so photographers can’t look at my work and criticize it technically, when what they really mean is “I wish you would do something else.”

So you’ve had to learn to be an expert.

I have been a very expert printer long enough for it to show in Women En Large as well as in Familiar Men. So I usually get an extremely positive technical reaction from photographers. And aside from technical commentary, I think I get the same reaction from photographers that I get from people in general. A “photographer” can be anything from somebody who likes to take pictures of their family to somebody who’s exhibiting professionally. From fine art photographers I generally get a really good reaction.

Do you feel you’ve changed the subject matter that some of them are seeing?

I get mail from people who, artistically, have been very seriously affected by my work. So yes, there’s no question about that.

And it may or may not take the path of them using the same subject matter?

Truthfully, most of the photographic work people send me or tell me about is work with the human body. They tell me they feel as if my work has freed them or pointed them in a direction they never expected to take. At an exhibition or a book or slide show, someone frequently says, “You know, your work has really made me feel free to do what I want.”

But people who sit down and write me long letters are usually people who are doing, not necessarily nude work, but work that is concerned with the human body. Or people who had not thought of doing work with the human body because they thought it was a very narrow area, stretching from A to B. But once they see my work they think, “You know, I could do something in that area, because it’s a much bigger space than I thought.” I just got a long letter from a woman in New York asking if I would look at her work. She saw my work seven years ago and it was one of the major determining factors underlying what she’s been doing.

When that sort of thing starts coming home after so long, and you realize you have profoundly affected peoples lives…

Yes, and going to Japan and realizing that the work crosses cultures, which is not something Debbie and I would ever have suspected.

And how does the reaction there differ?

It was amazing. Women En Large was part of a major museum exhibition in Japan three or four years ago, and Debbie and I both went for the opening. The amazing thing was that in that very different culture, the reaction was not that different. The size obsession in Japan makes the U.S. look like we don’t have one. I look like the “before” picture for a Japanese diet ad, and the “after” picture for an American one. I stood in the museum and saw women crying while looking at the pictures.

We gave a number of talks, and got the Japanese press equivalent of articles in The New York Times. My work was reviewed a lot and the pictures were printed in totally mainstream Japanese publications. Journalists and art critics had been writing about my work before I was in Japan, and the reaction has been very positive and very amazing. And also, more in Japan than in this country, men have looked at the work and said, “I just want you to know that I don’t think this looks very good.”

Do you think they were just more direct or more apt to feel that way?

The Japanese are extremely polite people. But I think there’s even less of my kind of work in Japan than there is here. So some of the reaction is just that it is shocking. On the other hand, a lot of men in Japan really like my work. And the fact that the Japanese are very excited about Familiar Men is really wonderful. One of the photographs has been used for a Japanese book cover, for a book by a woman who’s a popular culture critic and who has written about my work, but not in this particular book. And the picture reproduced very well, which is always nice.

My work has been shown in England and Denmark and Germany and the Netherlands, and been very well received. But Japan is not western culture. It’s a unique country. So the fact that the work transcends the cultural barrier is wonderful, but it certainly surprised us. The trip for the November exhibition will be my third professional trip to Japan.

One other thing that got me involved in the size acceptance aspect of my work is that I have two daughters. The younger one wasn’t fat — she was kind of sturdy. And yet, I realized, “Oh, my God; people are harassing my kid for being fat when there’s an epidemic of anorexia in the first grade.” And you start realizing that these young girls…

They start dieting in the first and second grade.

Yes. It’s gotten worse. It was never good, but it’s gotten progressively worse. In the Fifties, the models in magazines represented approximately twenty-five percent of the women. In the Eighties, when I was doing this work, we used to talk about how now the models in the magazines only represent nine percent of the women. Then we got to the nineties and computers, and now the models don’t represent anybody.

Not even the models.

Exactly. So you’ve got these little girls trying to make themselves look like women who don’t exist.

I’ve been doing size acceptance work since 1984, and we’ve seen really major change in that time. Something as simple as, when I started, fat women talked a lot about the fact that they couldn’t find attractive clothes. There weren’t any. Now, if they live in a major city or can get catalogues, fat women can get very nice clothes.

A few cities in this country have passed anti-size discrimination laws — San Francisco and Madison, Wisc., among them. And you see people like Camryn Manheim. So there has been a real change in attitudes. It’s still awful; it’s not like everything is sunshine and light. But a fat woman in this country can at least hear some positive messages and see some positive images. I’m not talking about people involved in a movement now; I’m talking about the average woman. She’s going to see some articles and she’s going to see some discussion of positive things about fat and size. That was not true when we started, at all.

That also makes me hopeful. I can already see things that are changing about how masculinity is viewed in the culture — that the work I’m doing now is also going to be very useful and clearly it is being done in a climate where it supports other work and that other work supports it.

With Women En Large, Debbie and I thought we were making a book for fat women. And we were wrong. Not that fat women don’t love the book, but we turned out to be making a book for everybody. So many people have fat mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers, husbands, partners that they think are beautiful, and the world is telling them they’re weird. The number of people we have had stand up in slide shows and say, “You know, I’ve always thought this person I love is beautiful and everyone around me made me feel like there was something wrong with me.” Those people needed the book as much as anybody else.

Donna Andrews

Donna Andrews is the author of Murder with Peacocks, which won the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Award in May 1998. Her second book in the Meg and Michael series, Murder with Puffins, will be released this spring.