I’ve been thinking about bodies a lot this week. About female bodies in particular. About having a body and being a body.
Photo from "VISIBLE: 60 Women at 60" © Jenny O'Connor In part, bodies have been on my mind because I have been observing my own body as it responds to a dietary experiment I have been conducting upon it. In a month it has grown lighter, pain from a long-standing inflammatory condition has all but disappeared, and so have the fluctuations in my mood and energy levels. It has been good to feel so well, to experience the plasticity and responsiveness of my body even though it is no longer young.
I have also been thinking about bodies because I have been looking through “Visible: 60 Women at 60”, a book of photographs of New Zealand women who are all the same age as I am. Wellington photographer, Jenny O’Connor who took the photographs and published the book earlier this year, is at the Arts Festival in Nelson this month to give a Workshop and to talk at the Page and Blackmore bookshop about the process of transforming creative ideas into a tangible outcomes.
I have also been thinking about bodies because I have been looking through “Visible: 60 Women at 60”, a book of photographs of New Zealand women who are all the same age as I am. Wellington photographer, Jenny O’Connor who took the photographs and published the book earlier this year, is at the Arts Festival in Nelson this month to give a Workshop and to talk at the Page and Blackmore bookshop about the process of transforming creative ideas into a tangible outcomes.
It is common for women to feel less and less visible as their bodies age. I know a woman of a certain age who claims - only half-jokingly – that she is now so perfectly invisible that even automatic doors fail to register her existence.
On the eve of her own sixtieth birthday O’Connor discovered that 1952, the year of her birth, was also the year with the highest birth rate in New Zealand’s history. She began to wonder how other women of her cohort felt about turning sixty. Her way of finding out was to invite sixty women, all aged sixty, to have their photographs taken with whatever clothing and props they desired.
Taken collectively the photographs are a portrait of a generation of New Zealand women who are daughters and sisters, wives, lovers and mothers but are also rescue workers, scientists, political activists, mountain climbers and artists. This generation, O’Connor says, “have done things that other generations of women have never done”.
The photographs are also of striking portraits of different quite individual women. They are of all physical types and cultural backgrounds and dressed in everything from body paint to Lycra, from hi-viz jacket to top hat and tails. Some wear hardly anything at all. Amongst the tools and talismans they have been photographed with are musical instruments, maps, bolts of cloth, flowers, a wheelchair, golf clubs and a jewelled skull.
Valerie Smith who has “a rather odd disability” (her description) is perched on a high stool in pillbox hat and fur stole. She looks as pert and as elegant as the bone china tea cup she has in her hand. Jennifer Shand, stands hands on hips, in jodhpurs and suede knee-length riding boots. Sue Bradford wears a lumber jack shirt and jeans. Taape O’Reilly brandishes a mere. Wendi Wicks appears as enigmatic as the yellow-eyed black cat she holds in her arms, while Julia Bracegirdle is a one-breasted Amazon astride her bicycle. All of the women are strikingly visible in both a physical and psychological sense.
It is common for women to feel less and less visible as their bodies age. I know a woman of a certain age who claims - only half-jokingly – that she is now so perfectly invisible that even automatic doors fail to register her existence.
Sadly, many women have an ambiguous and not altogether happy relationship with their bodies. They feel uneasy when their body is the subject of attention, especially the often unforgiving male gaze of the camera. For many women, therefore, becoming invisible is a relief and a liberation.
Taken collectively the photographs are a portrait of a generation of New Zealand women who are daughters and sisters, wives, lovers and mothers but are also rescue workers, scientists, political activists, mountain climbers and artists. This generation, O’Connor says, “have done things that other generations of women have never done”.
The photographs are also of striking portraits of different quite individual women. They are of all physical types and cultural backgrounds and dressed in everything from body paint to Lycra, from hi-viz jacket to top hat and tails. Some wear hardly anything at all. Amongst the tools and talismans they have been photographed with are musical instruments, maps, bolts of cloth, flowers, a wheelchair, golf clubs and a jewelled skull.
Valerie Smith who has “a rather odd disability” (her description) is perched on a high stool in pillbox hat and fur stole. She looks as pert and as elegant as the bone china tea cup she has in her hand. Jennifer Shand, stands hands on hips, in jodhpurs and suede knee-length riding boots. Sue Bradford wears a lumber jack shirt and jeans. Taape O’Reilly brandishes a mere. Wendi Wicks appears as enigmatic as the yellow-eyed black cat she holds in her arms, while Julia Bracegirdle is a one-breasted Amazon astride her bicycle. All of the women are strikingly visible in both a physical and psychological sense.
It is common for women to feel less and less visible as their bodies age. I know a woman of a certain age who claims - only half-jokingly – that she is now so perfectly invisible that even automatic doors fail to register her existence.
Sadly, many women have an ambiguous and not altogether happy relationship with their bodies. They feel uneasy when their body is the subject of attention, especially the often unforgiving male gaze of the camera. For many women, therefore, becoming invisible is a relief and a liberation.
With the photographs in this book Jenny O’Connor has managed to give women a different kind of visibility, to become visible on their own terms. Being photographed for the book was certainly a liberating experience for me, and I suspect for all of Jenny’s other subjects.
What made the experience so wonderful? Well, firstly, the eye gazing through the camera’s eye was female. The body behind the camera, and the body in front of it, had the shared experience of living sixty years in a female body with all its waxing and waning ambiguities.
Secondly, Jenny managed to create in her studio - a plain wood-floored space containing just cameras, lights and a blank backdrop and a box of dress-ups - a safely theatrical atmosphere in which the private and inchoate and unexpressed rose effortlessly to the surface and could then be made visible on film.
This thinking about bodies – the joys and the pains of this vehicle in which we spend our lives –
brings to mind a poem by U.S. poet Jane Kenyon:
What made the experience so wonderful? Well, firstly, the eye gazing through the camera’s eye was female. The body behind the camera, and the body in front of it, had the shared experience of living sixty years in a female body with all its waxing and waning ambiguities.
Secondly, Jenny managed to create in her studio - a plain wood-floored space containing just cameras, lights and a blank backdrop and a box of dress-ups - a safely theatrical atmosphere in which the private and inchoate and unexpressed rose effortlessly to the surface and could then be made visible on film.
This thinking about bodies – the joys and the pains of this vehicle in which we spend our lives –
brings to mind a poem by U.S. poet Jane Kenyon:
The visibility of older women isn't just a local thing - this New York-based on-line magazine featured
"Visible: 60 Women at 60" on its front page for an entire week.
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