Tag Archives: Women En Large:Images of Fat Nudes

Laurie is the November featured Artist for the National Women’s Caucus For Arts

Laurie says:

This is going up a few days late because I’ve been so focused on the election. I made 1500 calls for Biden over 6 weeks and talked to about 350 voters.

I was delighted when the National Women’s Caucus for Art unexpectedly contacted me to tell me that I was their chosen feature artist for November.

The photos choices were hard to make. (They always are.)

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Pandemic Shadows is my intense new photographic project. I’ve been working on it since June and it continues to use all my photographic energy and time.

I’ve been walking & living in the shadow of the pandemic and the lockdown, photographing the “Pandemic Shadows” that I see everywhere. I started being interested in shadow patterns when I began taking iPhone photos. The pandemic, the isolation, and the walking I’ve been doing, have transformed my vision, making it a far more emotionally involving. It lets me make beauty in hard times.

This is the first time I’ve seen myself in my art this way. It’s a shock to have the way I see change so powerfully. The world has changed so much and so quickly and my vision has inevitably followed.

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“Beach” is the last photograph in my book “Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes”. The suite of photographs in this book convey the beauty and power of the widest possible variety of fat women. I chose this picture because it reflects all of those things, and because it illustrates the relationship between bodies and landscape. My purpose as an artist was to make images that were fine art portraits, capturing an essential sense of the women who modeled.

Beach was our first major media exposure, published full page in the Utne Reader in the spring of 1994. We got hundreds of of letters in response. It was this publication and the positive reaction that made us decide to publish soon. (And a lot of other major media exposure followed this.) The book didn’t come out til the fall of 1994.

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“Women of Japan” shows the beauty and power of women of different classes, sizes, physical abilities and backgrounds, extending both Japanese and US standards of who is beautiful and who matters. The series includes photographs of women who are traditionally Japanese, Buraku, Korean residents, Okinawans, Ainu and other women who live in Japan but might be stereotypically described as “not Japanese.” My website includes texts by many of the models, in both Japanese and English. This photo is of Fumiko Nahamura, a long time Okinawan activist. I photographed her in her office when she was 92.

The project was made in conjunction with Japanese feminists. Making fine art portraits of women from another culture was challenging and required great effort and cooperation among all of us. I’m very grateful to the feminists who worked with me.

There is something very gratifying to see my work spanning 30 years in one place.

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The Art of Photography: My Image in Exhibition in Rome

Laurie says:

I’m very delighted to have a photograph in “The Art of Photography“. The PH21 Gallery exhibition is presented in Rome, in collaboration with KromArt Gallery and Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia Adams, a renowned Italian center for photography. (Oct 9th thru 30th)

I’ve had worked exhibited in 3 continents and five European countries, but this is the first time I’ve had work shown in Italy. It’s the photo of Debbie and Tracy from my book “Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes.” When I was working on Women En Large  with my writing partner Debbie Notkin, we worked very hard to have the work seen as broadly as possible.  This makes exhibition of the photo very special.

The exhibition was beautifully curated by Zsolt Bátori from the PH21 Gallery:

Although photography first emerged as a technological invention, it was also quickly conceived as an artistic practice as well. Pictorialist photographs in the nineteenth century were created to look like paintings, while advocates of straight photography in the first part of the twentieth century strived for the purely photographic means of creating photographic meanings. Street photographers devote the medium to capturing the fleeting moment, while in the last decades of the 20th century many photographers turned to staging and directing in order to utilize photography for artistic visual communication. Art photography also includes numerous genres and creative practices from portraiture, landscape and still life to abstract and conceptual photography. contemporary photographers {were asked} to show how they understand art photography in the 21st century.

When I first started as a photographer there were still rules about what was photographic “art” and what was not. There were still people who believed that color photography was not “art” and this was only 30 years ago. One of the many things I like about this exhibition is the remarkable breadth of the work. All of the photographs in the exhibition are here at the Ph21 Gallery. They are well worth seeing not only for the quality but also for the diversity of the images. They give a real sense of the complexity of the medium

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Follow Laurie’s new Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.