The Altar Barbie came down today. I felt a little odd about it. It’s the first piece I’ve done that is truly ephemeral. Now it exists only in the photographs from the exhibition. And it will be part of a short film made by Susan Stern, the director who made Barbie Nation. But the altar [...]

From the studio: The Nike ads got me thinking about photographs of parts of bodies. They belong to a long photography tradition tht includes both the work of Edward Weston and Ruth Bernhard . Usually, it’s work that reflects the photographer’s vision exclusively (working with shapes, working sculpturally) rather than portraying the model. It’s almost [...]

Did you ever wonder what provocative female nude poses look like when copied by a middle-aged man? Photographer Terry Donovan did. He produced a series of nearly fifty paired shots of female nudes he’s photographed over the years, with current pictures of himself in the same poses. He says, “Have a laugh at my expense,” [...]

It took us a few days to get to Pandagon‘s Amanda Marcotte writing about Wendy Shalit’s new website, www.modestyzone.net. One thing we notice immediately is that Shalit can’t decide whether her own modesty zone site is tongue in cheek or not. Really, labeling a section “shamelessly earnest poetry and essays” has an air of pointing [...]

Last month we talked about Dove Cosmetics’ “Campaign for Real Beauty”, which got lots of attention both here and around the blogosphere and the world of news. Now that campaign is receding into obscurity, Nike has begun an astonishing campaign called “What Story Does Your Body Tell?”, very interestingly discussed in Salon, by Rebecca Traister. [...]

Carol Squires came away from last week’s NAAFA panel with unanswered questions: CS: Were most photographs in Women En Large and Familiar Men shot with only you and model(s) in the space? LTE: Yes. All of my photographs are “environmental portraits”; the person always chooses the space in which they want to be photographed. I [...]

Laurie says: I’m often asked the difference between my experiences in photographing men and women in the nude. In fact, the question came up when Deb and I spoke at NAAFA last Friday. Mostly it’s very much the same. Almost everyone is nervous about being photographed even if they are not nude. I spend time [...]

This is a link to lots of images from the Altered Barbie Exhibition.

Researcher Elizabeth Loftus was a media darling in the repressed memory wars of the early 1990s, using dubious science to reinforce her position that repressed memories were completely unreliable and that no sexual abuse perpetrator should ever be convicted based on recovered memory evidence. Now she’s turned her awesome mental powers to the issue of [...]

On Friday afternoon, August 12, at 5 pm, we’ll be speaking at Big Summer Fun in San Mateo. This annual NAAFA (National Association for the Advancement of Fat Americans) conference is always an important political and a delightful social event. We’ll be talking about “Ten Years of Women En Large.” Okay, it’s actually been eleven [...]