The Century Project

Cara, 0

I know it's impossible to tell from the photograph, but the emerging baby really is a girl...this was the sixth delivery I photographed; the first five were boys!

Silvia, 2 1/2

Silvia is the niece of Renee', 17.

Nora, 11

“My mother was charged with child pornography for taking pictures of me in the bathtub when I was 8 years old. She has not been allowed to photograph me naked since then. The prosacuter said she had committed a crime, but the only crime I saw was committed by him when he refused to agknoledge her right as mother to document her daughter’s development.

Sometimes during the case I was so scared and worried that I could barely get through the day. Other kids tormented me in the playground,

“Did you know her Momma took pictures of her buck-naked?!”

Some who I barely knew, just being mean and not even stopping to think. There were hard times at home, too. 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.

I have a friend my age whose mother has been in jail for most of her (my friend’s) life. My friend has a lot of trouble expressing herself and has a lot of anger inside her. She lives with grandparents who are not really aquipped to take care of her and she lacks a lot of true friends. I was afraid if my family lost our case that I would end up like my friend, angry and alone. But our case didn’t turn out like that.

Our friends and community were extremely supportive. They held a candlelight vigle, a demonstration on the courthouse steps, and gave us a huge amount of money for our defence fund. My friends were really wonderful, as well. They were brave and strong and really helped me through a lot of rough times.

I didn’t realize until I saw Century that I had been wanting to get this story out into the world since I was 8 years old. I wanted to be in this project not because I want people to pitty me, but because I want people to see how stupid it was for my mother and many others to be prosecuted. Look at my picture. Do I look abused to you? Or do I look like a happy child with wonderful parents whose only “abuse” has come from those who have tried to take away our right to live the way we do.

For me, my naked bodie is normal; for me, my naked body is wild and free; for me, my naked bodie is being proud for who and what I am.”

Nora

Katie 16

Katie and her mother attended an exhibition of Century at UNH a few years ago. She left the following note:

“...This brought out a lot of emotions for me, who struggles every day to accept my body as a recovering anorexic.”

While certainly started on the path to recovery, she was in fact in denial/relapse at the time. Two years later, however, I received a lengthy, very personal letter from her in which she described where she had been, and what the pressures on her were. Her candor, plus the fact that her weight was finally in a normal range, lead me to believe that Katie is now OK. She added:

“Posing for you was one of the greatest experiences of my life, though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Also included was the following poem:

                       “Your airy grace onstage astounded me
                        But! Your bone thin body impressed me more.
                        Never mind that you
                                 Chain smoked,
                                          Rarely ate,
                                                   Purging what you did consume.
                        In my eyes you were beauty, lusted after Goddess.
                        Every night I dreamed of being you - and I took
                        all the steps to the Golden Palace of Skeletalness.
                        Caffeine was my best friend, diet pills my lovers.
                        Death and I tangoed, salsaed, and walzed,
                        Him leading, I following.
                        Every new bone visible - my twisted trophies -
                        ribbons on a barn wall.
                        Pain and anguish - Familiar faces.
                                  Anything
                                          to be a
                                                    Dancer.”

Paula, 20

“Paula is a tad more than just another weekend “gym-rat.” At nineteen, she was the U.S. National Teenage Body-Building Champion. Is she proud of her body? Of course! She is equally proud of being completely drug-free - no steroids - just a lot of hard work. Yet there is a price one must seemingly pay in order to compete at this level; in the weeks leading up to major competitions, losing all weight that isn’t muscle becomes a real priority.

Paula’s diet at those times is hardly healthy: she is on the edge of being eating-disordered in spite of her magnificent physique.”

This was the description I used with Paula’s picture for over ten years. Then while poking around the internet, I came across some other information which demands inclusion.

Paula had left New Hampshire where I met her to pursue a career in southern California, where there was a bigger body-building community. She achieved some success as a competitive body-builder; her best finish was placing first as a lightweight in the 1990 North American Championships.

Eventually she wound up in Las Vegas.

A writer in the on-line body-building media stated that she “would be a perfect figure or fitness woman today if she were allowed to have that much muscle. Sadly, she continued to diet down to get thinner, never to compete again…”

Two other body-builders went to a strip club in Vegas where by chance Paula worked as a waitress, among other things. They each paid her to do a lapdance on the other, and described her as “so bone skinny we feared she was anorexic.”

On November 14th, 2001, she was found dead in her apartment. Paula was 33.

The coroner said she died of “natural causes.” The likely truth is that anorexia killed her. Is that natural?

Cathy 32

"I have walked around with an onion skin, thick and dry, waiting to be peeled back, my core revealed... there is a big difference between being exposed by others and exposing yourself."

Several months before I photographed Cathy, a man she knew tried to rape her.

Jody, 33

It is with a great sense of joy that I have come to participate in this project among so many real and vibrant women.

Fat women are real women. We are the forgotten goddesses of softness and sensuality. I believe that fat women are uniquely nurturing and powerful.

However, in a society obsessed with being thin, we goddesses have been cast aside. It is for this reason that I have posed. I want to be a reminder to our culture that beauty exists in many forms. Some of the most beautiful forms are large, juicy, and cuddlesome.

Linda, 33

Linda was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy; at the time I photographed her, she was given five years to live. She has already beaten that sentence, however, clearly the result of her attitude toward life, toward people, and toward herself.

A few years ago, I got the following e-mail from her.

I am now 46 years old, living on a narrowboat in London, writing and illustrating books about working women of the 19th century.

Your photograph of me 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. The muscular dystrophy continues its inexorable process of weakening me spindle by spindle, but I refuse to let my physical limitations prevent me from pursuing my dreams. I am exploring England by canal and reveling in life!

Thank you!

Linda

Mayé, 36

Yo soy artista,
I am an artist.
I see the human body
as a marvelous creation of nature,
full of every variety
of curves and contours
that lie within the skin
covering muscles and ligaments and bones.
This is our vessel.
Full of atoms of empty space,
it holds our essence, our spirit, our soul.
It contains my blood, my heart, and my nerves.

I am the creator of three outstanding sons.
They are my masterpieces,
they grew in my body,
kicked around and wiggled,
found their way out to the light.
My body housed their vessels.

I am not ashamed of my body.
Through it, I gave life;
through it, I create.
It houses God energy, universal energy,
the christ, the light, the Buddha, the earth, the son, the manna of life,
our bodies,
the infinite variety of human beings,
expressions of a creative universal power.

It flows through me,
to my sons,
to my artwork,
to my hands.
In my cooking
and walking,
laughing and crying,
it flows through me in times of pain and anguish,
and it flows through you, too.

My vessel, skin like the earth, houses a fire like the fireplace that I stand next to.

Mayé

Jacqueline, 38

Today I am wearing long and flowing purple without my false front and feeling stunning. What do I mean, my false front? My prosthesis that mimics that diseased part of my body that was cut away years ago to save my life. My fake boob, my rubber tit, my concession to society’s denial that women lose breasts every day.

My bra goes along with the farce, holding my other breast high and firm like a 16-year-old’s that has never seen battle. Well, my breast is not high and firm, it hangs from my chest and rolls when I walk.

It has nourished and nurtured dozens of children and it smiles at the memory of those lips that have rested there. Tiny rosebud lips and grown men’s lips, all there for the same thing, nourishment and nurturing.

There is a shooting-star shaped scar on my breast, a sickle, a half moon. There are crevices where the skin has stretched taut with passion and stretched full with milk. No, this is no 16-year-old nubile breast, it is the breast of a warrior woman, proud and regal.

Jacquelyn

Kathleen, 40

“In six years, I have gone from being an angry, depressed, suicidal ‘male’ to a well adjusted and very happy transsexual woman. In this picture, you see me on the bank of Minnehaha Creek in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the side opposite the very well-traveled Minnehaha Parkway. It is a place where I spend a lot of my time; a connecting greenspace than links several lakes and the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

At the time this photo was taken, I was three weeks from having had ‘The Surgery.’ Far too much significance is made of that event by the general public. In a transgendered person’s reality, all of the real work of transition is long accomplished by the time most of us dance with the steel side of the knife. Surgery is nearly an afterthought. It will affect my day-to-day life in almost no way whatsoever. The only people who should care or be affected by it are those I may choose to be intimate with. It is important to my internal well-being, or I would not have proceeded. I’ve been living as a woman for over four years now, and succeeding reasonably well. I have a steady job, a loving partner and a very active social life. I’ve never been happier.I have described myself at times as a ‘woman of non-traditional origin.’ I make no secret of my transsexuality. I am very out and open about it, occasionally sitting on panels in front of university classes. Up until my mid-30’s I had no name for whatever it was that had me so twisted up inside. I grew up in small, rural Midwestern towns. Internet connections and cable TV were a long time in coming. I was depressed from puberty onward, without ever really knowing the root cause. I had no vocabulary, no concepts to define why I felt so out of place in every social group or situation I encountered. I could be a peripheral member of many groups, even as far back as high school, but never felt like I really belonged anywhere. In my mid 30’s, I attended a lecture given by a transsexual woman. Once I had the exposure to another person like me, my path became crystal clear. I have never doubted, from that moment forward, that I would end up completing this transition. I volunteered for this project because I think it important to let others know that not all women are born that way; some of us have to get there by circuitous routes.”

Kathleen

Jin-Sook, 41

“I am the essence of nature.”

Jin Sook

(The name “Jin” means truth; “Sook” = full)

Antrece, 44

My mother says “I have the nerves of a Brass-Ass Monkey!”

My family says “I am the good child. The one that follows instructions and obeys the rules (most times).”

My ex-husband, boyfriends and lovers say “I am uncompromising!”

My friends say “I am outspoken, compassionate, funny, and non-judgmental!”

My daughter says “My Mommi is crazy!”

I say “I am energetic, vibrant, and transparent!” “I am liberated from the pain of my past!”

Most important: “I am a goddess!”

Antrece.

Sibby, 82

You’d think an older generation of women would feel more of a sense of shame, but I felt perfectly at ease—we had a very good time.

Sibby

Else, 87

Else passed on a little more than two years after I made this photograph. Though wonderfully sound of mind, she was by now trapped in a very painful body. Her politics and philosophy were never particularly conservative; she believed strongly, for example, in euthanasia, and ultimately chose that option for herself.

Her full name was Else Maria Rosetta Charlotta Outzen Cordelle.

She was my mother.

Mary, 94

Life at its fullest at 94. A little naughty always. I love men and adore the naturist clubs that have rejuvenated me.

I posed so some old lady will not fear age, and some old men would know old women are not so strange. I loved the challenge of posing nude, such excitement!

My husband would have said, “Some picture, kid!”

Mary