Beautiful: Nudes. . - eye - book review

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2002 by Regina Woods

Beautiful: Nudes by Marc Baptiste Photographs by Marc Baptiste Text by Bethann Hardison, Deborah Gregory and Pamela Chess Universe Publishing December 2001, $45.00 ISBN 0-789-30646-8

Shame has been the veil through which many of us have viewed our naked bodies at times. Early on, we learned that nudity was disgraceful and unnatural, and throughout our lifetimes have donned heavy burkas of shame to shield our bodies from view.

In The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Deborah Willis, a professor of photography at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and Carla Williams, a writer and photographer, have expertly begun to identify circumstances and abuses that have sent our bodies into hiding, while Beautiful: Nudes by Marc Baptiste, embraces and celebrates our naked forms.

"A desire to see our likeness" has for decades propelled Willis' search for photographic testimonies to our existence, having published several books on African-American representation in photography. In her latest work, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, coauthored with Carla Williams, Willis gets very specific and personal, and explores representations of black female bodies in photographs from the mid-19th century to the present. The two have culled some 185 images and written documentation from long-forgotten exhibit catalogues, diaries, and obscure private collections in the U.S. and Europe, as well as analyses of contemporary photographic works by black women artists who "use and confront these historical images," as they wrestle with issues of self-representation.

The Black Female Body is divided into two broad sections: the "Colonial Conquest" and "Cultural Body." Many of the 19th-century images of naked or partly clothed black women are mere specimen studies, "tools of ethnographic classification." This aesthetic was shaped by Europe's conquests in Africa and other lands; its growing interest in natural science, and its Nazi-like fascination with recording the sizes of skulls and sex organs informed these early compositions.

American photographer Joseph T. Zealy's misogynistic pictures of enslaved women striped down to the waist attest to America's shared values. The book also examines how abolitionists like Sojourner Truth, artists of the New Negro Movement and the Black Arts Movement used images to counter oppressive representations of the black female body. The book moves back and forth between images of female bodies as specimens, metaphors for colonized territories, signifiers of hypersexuality, neutered mammies, and self-defined subjects. This collection of rare and controversial photographs by itself makes The Black Female Body an important volume for the general reader, cultural historian or photo enthusiasts. Coupled with the tremendous amount of research and visual analysis, it should be standard in social science and humanities libraries.

A compilation of 125 artistically rendered nude photographs, Beautiful: Nudes by Marc Baptiste presents women of all ages, shapes and ethnicities. Actors Vanessa Williams, Lisa Raye and Stacey Dash, and supermodel Beverly Johnson, are among those who bare themselves before fashion photographer Marc Baptiste's lens. The images range from artistic explorations of light, form and movement, and still others present the body as a sexual commodity. Those images in Beautiful in which the women did not abandon their bodies once they were uncovered were the most imposing. Self-confidence seemed to cloak them.

As interesting as the bodies themselves are, the environment in which many of the images were photographed is just as compelling. Details such as artwork, furnishings, and photographs that serve as a background in these spaces reveal details about the subject beyond her body.

Beautiful is Baptiste's first book, although his photography has been featured regularly in magazines such as Essence, Elle, Vibe, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, among others. Those images are of tall, thin, airbrushed supermodels whose proportions are those of the very young or nearly emaciated, and often do damage to our psyches. In general, fashion photography has not been encouraging for women and their body image. And because black female bodies are seen less frequently in these fashion magazines, we often suffer from nonrepresentation as much as misrepresentation. Given this set of realities, Beautiful, with is appreciation for diversity of female bodies is remarkable to behold. Nevertheless, the images still beg the question, `Does it help women reclaim their bodies?' Or does it respond to the question posed in the conclusion to Willis' text, "is the female body [in Beautiful] still doing what it [was] trained to do?" I look forward to the dialogue the book will generate.

--Regina Woods is a BIBR editor.