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 Women through the ages

Bodies and Souls challenges conventional images of women

A review by Renée Stephen

February 2007

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Frank Cordelle’s Bodies and Souls: The Century Project (ISBM 978-0-9730270-3-7) has toured art galleries, colleges and universities, and even churches in the USA and Canada for many years. The photographic project showcases women from the moment of birth to the age of 94, all nude, and all unique. In November the project was published in Canada as a book, and the result is now for sale in most major bookstores.  

When you open the book, you’re greeted by a baby’s crowning head. Cordelle notes that, although it’s hard to tell from the picture, this is indeed a girl (the first five deliveries he photographed, however, were boys); her name is Cara. The book showcases almost a hundred girls and women, from the age of zero to the age of 94. The women each have different body shapes, different ethnicities, and different abilities, but each shares her unique body and her unique story with Cordelle and, by extension, the viewer.  

Each photo, whether a shy seven-year-old who is photographed just as she breaks into laughter, or a bookish and grandmotherly woman sitting quietly in her library with a faint smile on her face, has a story to tell. Most of the photographs are accompanied by a personal statement by the women herself about why she is posing, and these statements are what give the exhibition its kick. Some of the stories are heartwarming; some are heartbreaking. More than one woman viewing the exhibition has been moved to tears by the photographs and stories of the courageous women who have posed in front of Cordelle’s lens.  

The project started as a touring exhibition twenty-five years ago. I didn’t expect it to become my life’s work, says Cordelle. But he wouldn’t have it any other way. Intrigued by the power of photography as a tool for social change, he left a PhD program in biochemistry at Brandeis University just short of becoming Dr. Cordelle, he says, and went to New Hampshire, where he spent several summers photographing handicapped athletes at track-and-field meets. There, he saw the effect that his photographs could have on others, showing disabled individuals as real people.  

The idea for The Century Project was born shortly thereafter, although the project itself took years to get off the ground. When he first formulated the goal of taking pictures of women from birth to old age, he thought that it would take him maybe five years to complete the work. But then, he says, “I didn’t anticipate that it would be as difficult as it turned out to be,” - nor as rewarding. This has been a truly powerful experience, whose impact has been greater than anything else in my life.  

Many of the women in the photos are happy and healthy, smiling and carefree, happy to be showing the world their bodies and sharing their stories. And some of the women in the book - far too many - don’t like their bodies. An extremely attractive fifty-year-old woman named Mondy writes about the fact that her mother constantly told her that she was worthless and ugly. “I was unlovable and unloved,” Mondy writes. Since then, she has had multiple plastic surgeries; she calls her breast implants “spiritual band-aids.” From that “ugly duckling,” she created a face and body that she could live with - but, she writes, the important work remains to be done, on the inside. And Ofelia, a striking 40-year-old Philippina woman, believes that her stretch marks make her sexually undesirable - so much so that, of two ex-husbands and a lover, only one has seen her naked with the lights on. But she has posed for The Century Project; that is the magic of the photographs. There are also many women in the book who are rape survivors or cancer victims; several of the adolescent girls are anorexic, or cut themselves. Through the photos and the personal statements, the reader comes to understand each woman in a fascinating and beautiful way - as a whole person, flaws and all, outside and inside.  

Some of the photographs show the same woman twice, as a child and later as an adolescent, and others as mature women years apart. Kelsi appears at age seven as a pudgy child with curly brown hair and a shy smile. She writes in her first statement that, although she felt shy during the photo shoot, after a while “I wasn’t shy at all because I felt free.” When she appears again, at age 15, she is standing in a lake with an arm wrapped protectively around her body, looking defiantly at the camera. She writes that she hates her body because of her large breasts and the unwanted attention they attract, but that she wanted to pose again to help other girls come to terms with their own bodies. “This is me,” she writes. “I’m not hiding anymore.”  

As well, some of the women in the exhibit are disabled, something which breaks two cultural taboos: first, the basic taboo against nudity, particularly of women who aren’t Playboy models. The second is an acknowledgement of the sexuality of handicapped people. Linda, a 33-year-old with muscular dystrophy, appears naked in her wheelchair, arms outstretched, smiling. She had been given five years to live. But in her picture, she has a huge smile on her face. Years later, and years past that five-year sentence, she wrote a letter to Cordelle; she told him that his photo was “a life-changing image” - the first time I perceived my own body as something other than the painful dysfunctional enemy. Through your lens I saw myself as capable, fun, and sexy.” And, yes, she is. Kerry, another subject in the book and a double amputee, will never see her photo: she is blind as the result of diabetes. But she, too, is laughing in her picture.  

As the book progresses, as their ages progress, more of the women show the scars of breast cancer. The images of older women are particularly inspiring: each one has grace and charm, and reveals to us that, despite our fear of aging, you can still feel sexy and fun and gorgeous at 32 or 56 or 74. Although none of the pictures are in any way sexual, each picture - the women who hate their bodies, or are missing a breast, even the little girls who aren’t yet women - shows us the promise that each person has within her to be, in all possible ways, female. These women are hiding nothing; each photo is incredibly freeing, and they help the reader come to terms with real bodies and lived experiences. These women are sharing their entire selves with the world - hence the title of the book, Bodies and Souls.  

When writing this review, I asked whether or not we should include pictures of naked women in Independent Voice. What will our readers think? Heck, what will our advertisers think? Part of the answer to that question is easy: our mandate as a progressive paper is to publish things the mainstream won’t. In 1996, Calgary Herald publisher Ken King refused to include an issue of Saturday Night magazine as an insert to his newspaper, because it included naked pictures of an 80-year-old woman. Even though Saturday Night had run pictures of full nudity in the past, the women then had been young, not old. Sibby is 82. Why not publish her picture?

And as for publishing a naked photo of a young girl, the girl herself has something to say about that. The picture of Nora was taken when she was twelve. Four years earlier, Nora almost lost her family and everything she knew. “My mother was charged with child pornography for taking pictures of me in the bathtub when I was 8 years old,” she writes. “The prosacuter [sic] said that she had committed a crime.” But for Nora, her anguish didn’t arise from the photos her mother took, but from the effects of the criminal proceedings on her family. “My worst memory of the case was one morning when I was eating breakfast and we got a phone call, and my mother answered, hung up, and started sobbing. ˜I can’t take it anymore,” was what she said.” Nora writes that she wanted to be in The Century Project to get her story out to the world. “I want people to see how stupid it was for my mother and many others to be prosecuted. Do I look abused to you? Or do I look like a happy child with wonderful parents[?]”  

The book of The Century Project took five years to come to fruition. Every single major publisher that Cordelle approached turned him down, due to the controversial subject matter, particularly the photos of naked children - but you can’t document the lives of women from zero to ninety-four without including eleven and twelve. Despite the huge critical success of the show, nobody wanted to publish it as a book. “What’s funny is that, if I had exhibits and people trashed it, I would have walked away,” Cordelle says, “But the grassroots responses are phenomenal.” So he kept looking. While he’s often embraced by the grassroots, the establishment, on the other hand, “doesn’t know what to do with me.” In one case, Cordelle relates, “I went in to meet with a bunch of editors personally. Two of them were emotional to the point of having tears in their eyes. But they backed away from it at the end.”  

But why? Anybody who views the exhibits will immediately understand that they do not appeal to any “prurient interest.” Cordelle writes in the book that, in the twenty-five years that the show has toured, high-ranking police officers and prosecutors have attended his exhibits, and none have ever batted an eye. But economic censorship in the USA has convinced many publishers that it just isn’t worth it to sell art of this kind. When Barnes and Noble carried Jock Sturgess’s photos of nude adolescents, the company was indicted in two states for selling child pornography; although the indictments were tossed out in the end, “This was a shot across the bow of publishers. The message is that, if you try to sell it, it will cost you five figures in court,” says Cordelle.  

Cordelle did find one small publisher in the USA who was willing to publish the book, but he eventually settled on a Canadian publisher in Toronto, a publisher who is “very committed to the project,” he says. That publisher is Dr. Paul Rapoport, who runs Heureka Productions, which released the book in November 2006.

“This book is vital, a revolution in its simplicity, in its ability to undo much of the negative misassumptions and coding we have loaded onto women’s bodies,” Rapoport says. He has been a university professor for almost thirty years and has written six books, but he says, “This book means more to me than anything I have ever done.” That passion, and his willingness to publish the book because of its inherent artistic and social value, despite possible repercussions, illustrates the depth of the corporate cowardice of every publishing company who turned Cordelle down.  

Cordelle is currently working on a second edition where, he says, he’d like to include even more diversity - diversity of race and of body type. “There are pictures on a little list I carry around in my head that I haven’t had access to yet. The very old, certain ethnic groups, tough emotional situations .?.?. People come up to me and told me a story that is more amazing than anything I could have thought up.”  

The book is well worth buying. And it is likely to become a huge success: it will soon be reviewed in O: The Oprah Magazine. Aside from the sheer volume of women who read O magazine, positive publicity from the official vehicle of one of the most powerful women in America makes it far less likely that there will be any negative repercussions for Cordelle or for the bookstores who are carrying his work, even in the more repressive states. And, hopefully, it will open the door for more work of this kind.