Laurie Toby Edison

Laurie Toby Edison (1942-) has been a photographer since 1989. Her most notable work to date has primarily dealt with the subject of female and male nudes in America in two series that not only aim to radically undermine stereotypes of gender and race, but are also intimate and revealing portraits, usually taken in the models' homes.

Publications and Exhibitions

In 1994 she published Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, a black & white fine art photography book. Her book Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes, was published in the fall of 2003. She is currently working on Women of Japan, clothed portraits of women from many cultures and backgrounds. A retrospective of 100 of her photographs “Meditations on the Body: Recent Work” was exhibited at the National Museum of Art in Osaka. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including New York City, Tokyo, Kyoto, Toronto, Boston, London, and San Francisco.

About her work

Edison works collaboratively with the people she photographs. “We are already in an intense relationship by the nature of the work; the act of portraiture, clothed or unclothed, is profound. We work together to choose the locale, the poses, the familiar items in the photographs. I do not perceive anyone I photograph as a ‘passive object.’”

Photographer and commentator Tee Corinne has said that Edison’s work "is unique in focusing on the nude without eroticizing it." Edison says “Bodies are sensual, and that’s part of my work, but I am engaged with the whole person in his or her space.”

Background

Edison was born in 1942 in New York City, and she grew up in the intensely intellectual post-war world. Her mother was a dress designer and her grandmother made jewelry. Her family intended her for the academic intelligentsia. Edison was brought up in a museum culture where art was a joy, and Abstract Expressionism was considered the final resolution of Western Art.

At that time, the air was filled with photographs and movie and TV images. In her neighborhood, some people had concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms, and newspapers and magazines had photographs of the piled-up naked bodies of the Holocaust dead. Women had very few opportunities and choices. As a Jewish girl child Edison absorbed all of this.

She came to adolescence in the "beat" era, which was her first window out of the narrow box of 1950's society. Edison still remembers reading Allen Ginsberg's Howl on the subway at 14. The music and the mores of the black jazz scene helped her to open that window further. She decided not to become part of that intelligentsia but to work with her hands.

Since Edison was 19 she has made jewelry that is sculpture. Even now that she is also a photographer, the jewelry/sculpture work continues to be an important part of her life. Edison likes to live in places where art and social change intersect – where it is possible to combine them. Her two daughters have helped shape her work from their childhood.

Edison became involved in feminism in her 30s, and since she moved to San Francisco at age 38 it has been central in her life. Edison became active in the Fat Acceptance/Size movement working with Debbie Notkin. The Women En Large project came out of that—the book, gallery exhibitions around the world, and many speaking engagements that gave her the opportunity to see how her work transformed lives.

Edison's views on her work

Just as Women En Large is her statement on the female nude, at least at this time, Familiar Men is her statement on the male nude. The five years she spent photographing men and talking with them have transformed her vision of masculinity in this time and place, as well as how she perceives the body in her work. Edison first saw all her nude photographs, men and women together, in Kyoto in November of 2001. She realized that they are a single body of work imbuing the individual nudes with dignity and presence.

When she looks at her work, Edison sees compositions framed by someone whose first visions were abstract - someone who needed to transform the images of the piled-up Holocaust dead into work that honors the living body. Edison feels she shows the disappeared, she makes the invisible visible.

External links

• Official Site
  • Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes
  • Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes
  • Women of Japan

This article is based on a GNU FDL LGBT Wikia article: Toby Edison Laurie Toby Edison

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