Laurie and Debbie say:

Readers of the blog have probably noticed the holiday ad on the right on the main blog page. Many of you know Laurie’s photography (and Debbie’s text), but others may not be so familiar with what we were doing before we started Body Impolitic.

Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes (Books in Focus, 1994)

and Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes (Shifting Focus Press, 2004)

are each on sale for $15 including shipping: a great bargain given that both are usually available for $25 plus shipping!

There are two great things about doing art that is social change work: the art and the social change. We won’t talk about the art, because the photographs speak for themselves.

The social change aspects, on the other hand, make stories. We’ve heard about women who’ve thrown away their entire wardrobe and bought a new one after looking at the pictures, or bought a bathing suit for the first time in years.

We watched a man who had been a porn model burst into tears at a slide show, just at the concept that there could be nudes of men who didn’t have to look perfect.

It’s no exaggeration: these photographs, and these books, change lives. Buying them for yourselves is terrific; giving them to the right someone else can start a cascade of exactly the kind of changes we all want to see.

In the early days of Women En Large, the pictures, plus a long talk with Laurie which would never have happened without the pictures, helped a woman recover from active, life-limiting anorexia. When the Familiar Men pictures were shown in at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, one of the workmen on staff at the museum wrote the senior curator to say how much the pictures changed how he felt about himself, and how important that was to him.

These books are the tangible markers of our work together. Our goals are to make the invisible visible, to widen the range of what is beautiful and what is powerful, and to help change the way people see. Buying the books gets the images out into the world where they can do good, and also supports our work; in particular, giving it to someone you think is beautiful but they don’t think so is a perfect way to show them what you see in them. At the same time, book sales let us keep and enrich the blog, they seed new projects for Laurie, and they pay the bills.

Isn’t there someone you know who needs a copy? Or several someones?

Tell your friends.