Colorful Times » Photography

Portraits of Eve: Women of Color Share Their Body/Soul Conversations

Paul Boakye — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:23:55 +0000

I love photography. Love seeing ‘people of colour’ captured in strong black and white images. Love fearless form and clarity in pictures. Love perfect composition, and seeing thinking outside of the box, photographically speaking, I mean.

I want to see dark-skinned people pictured using impeccable lighting—all shades, shadows and textures lifted in near 3D tone and quality—just as it was once said could never be achieved with black skin in photography. So when I was offered the chance to download and review an electronic copy of Herb Way’s book, Portraits of Eve: Women of Color Share Their Body/Soul Conversations, I was terribly excited.

I have always been comfortable with my body. Being adopted by an Italian family got me used to being different and I grew up with the belief that it was a wonderful thing.

I’ve never met Herb Way. I know little about him or his work, except what can be found on his Facebook profile. I therefore had no concept of what to expect from his first book of photographic images. But as I flipped through its pages, and read the personal statements accompanying each photograph, I was surprised by the number of women who spoke of their bodies in terms of ‘scars.’ They had been scarred by pregnancy, hormones, stress, diet or illness, many said, or they talked of a need for breast-reduction, as opposed to the normal breast-enlargement that figure so prominently in most male fantasies.

I was immediately drawn to these personal stories, and struck by how much the human body is still just a vessel. Here were women of all ages, shapes, sizes, and shades, revealing and revelling in their nudity for all the world to see. Whereas we are normally encouraged to think of naked female forms as purely sexual objects, particularly in this porn-obsessed Internet age, there was something very different going on here.

One woman spoke of how her scarring had been diminished by the still athletic parts of her body—which she liked, worked on and emphasised—whilst masking those areas that troubled her most. Another was unhappy with an extremely thin frame from childhood but masked her pain with a long synthetic wig that seemed to suggest other issues. Having both positive and negative body parts that were still considered part of each woman’s overall beauty was a recurring theme in many of the personal testimonies.

I try not to place too much emphasis on appearances. I believe that the spirit is much more relevant.

Among the male friends I showed this book, many commented on one or two images in particular. “Why were some of the good-looking model-types covered up,” when they at least should be used to being photographed or looked at, and presumably, more comfortable showing their flesh in public? I didn’t see it quite that way. It left me thinking about how difficult it must be for some models and ordinary women too in our society; constantly having people critiquing your body, your looks, in a way that most men are never subjected to and would never voluntarily undergo. Of course, men self-critique, but if our perception of self were based largely on our external appearance, most men I know, and certainly many of those in positions of power, would have no self-esteem at all.

With the women featured in this book, there was little direct discussion on how their body image may have been influenced by the men in their lives. These personal stories centred instead on structural, social or cultural influences, and the women’s own perceptions of themselves. Many cited the act of being photographed nude for this 144-page volume as part of their ongoing process of healing.

Every roll, dimple, and scar...is a marker of my life...wonderful nights with my lover, late night ice cream parties with my friends, and the birth of my children.

In this sense, Portraits of Eve has very little to do with the male gaze. For in our society where female nudity is most often about male pleasure, male power and the objectification of women, Herb Way’s book is a brave and enlightening departure from the norm. Yet ‘brave’ is perhaps the wrong word, but ‘empowered,’ which is so much more useful for millions of ordinary women such as those featured here.

Also of note was how the various women self-identified: African American, Native American, Korean, Trinidadian/Italian, Filipino, Brazilian, and so on. My sincere thanks to Herb Way for an opportunity to appreciate the loving and wonderful work that has gone into the preparation of Portraits of Eve: Women of Color Share Their Body/Soul Conversations, and especially to the women themselves for making public the intimate and private photographic sessions that he has so tenderly recorded with them. Herb Way and his camera love real women, just like these women have grown to love themselves.

The self-published, 144-page book, Portraits of Eve: Women of Color Share Their Body/Soul Conversations, containing 120 photographs of semi-nude and nude images of sixty women will be available from September 2010. Production costs are being offset by sales of the e-book version and by advanced sales of the hard copy edition at a special pre-publication price.

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Paul Boakye

Writer, editor and marketing specialist who sat on The Power Inquiry. Former editor and CEO of the consumer lifestyle magazine, Drum (UK), and author of five plays published for an academic audience by Alexander Street Press, USA. Recipient of business and writing awards, including prestigious accolades such as advising British government, BBC radio and TV commentator, and invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II in 2007. Currently works as a communications professional, creating contagious ideas to help great brands change the conversation to their advantage, across the entire Central and West African region.

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Herman Leonard in The Age of Jazz

Paul Boakye — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:37:58 +0000

Friend and photographer to the immortals of jazz, Herman Leonard is the daddy of jazz photography. Paul Boakye caught up with a living legend still in pursuit of pleasure.

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, March 6th 1923, Herman Leonard was eight years old when he walked into a darkroom and saw naked pictures of his brother’s wife developing in a tray. It was 1931 with no Playboy magazine or anything like that around and the nudity shocked him. Then he said, “wait a minute, if he can do that with a camera, why can’t I?”

He never told his brother what he had seen that day, but he pestered him for a camera and got to borrow an old Box Brownie. He added a roll of film, pointed the thing and went outside. His first ever pictures were of his friends playing baseball in the yard. The next day they were developed and printed and he gave the prints away. All of a sudden he became a very popular young boy indeed. It was this same tactic that Herman used years later to gain unrestricted access to the late greats of jazz.

“I dreamt as a child of being Marco Polo. I wanted to travel all over the world and delve into other cultures and ethnic groups, and all that fascinated me.”

For many people, the photography of Herman Leonard is their first link to jazz culture. Classic portraits of Dexter with a Chesterfield, Duke in Paris, Billie and her dog, Mister, Miles in Malibu, Satchmo in Birdland …These images, in some cases more so than the music, are responsible for our devotion to preserving and protecting the art that musicians of mid 20th Century America created, and Herman was there to report it. It really wasn’t an exploratory thing about different cultures that dragged him into the heart of America’s black jazz scene. You can see it too in Herman’s ‘jazz work’ which came about because he really liked the music. Photography was a way for him to get into the clubs for nothing and get up close to the musicians.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS-tTooJ8qM

When we think of the Harlem Renaissance, apartheid in South Africa, the great jazz years or the civil rights movement in America, we often notice the coming together of great black and Jewish artists and activists. I asked him what he thought it was that often brings these two groups of people together. “Poverty!” he says, bluntly. “If you’re black you have two strikes against you right away. If you’re Jewish you have a strike and a half against you right away. But minorities, certainly in those days, had a very difficult time in achieving lofty positions in business or anything else. So they went into the arts. It didn’t matter in the arts whether you were black or green, if you could play the instrument.” Except that if you were black, I remind him, you just couldn’t sit at the same table as most of the people who had come to see you play.

“I just hung out. I was just hanging around and shooting pictures of the people I liked. Fortunately, the early work was strictly for myself and not commissioned jobs for magazines or albums. So I had total freedom of expression.”

Indeed, one of the most moving things about Herman Leonard’s photography is that he has never been a mere ‘tourist’ (on the outside looking in) but a participant (describing the inside from the inside) in all that he photographs. This is, I believe, why his photographs resonate with a special intimacy and nobility. In other words, his process directly illustrates the importance (and benefits) of actual participation in the world that we inhabit.

There is a clear and unpretentious symbiotic relationship between Herman and the subjects of his work, hence the viewer can feel the joy, the genius, the power of ‘being there.’ Not to mention his sheer mastery of the technical aspects of the art itself. But I am not objective at all when it comes to Herman’s photography.

“A lot of the pictures I shot in those days were not reproducible in news print; they’re too dark. In a fine quality magazine like Drum, yeah, but we didn’t have any fine quality jazz magazines.”

I ask him why he had spent so much time living outside of America, wasn’t he happy at home. “It’s just the way my life went,” he insists. Hired by Marlon Brando to be his personal photographer in 1954, they travelled to the Far East and on their way back, Herman stopped off in Paris. “France, as opposed to America, was a colonial empire with a certain amount of tolerance of other colours and cultures, so when black musicians came over who were very well known the French were enchanted. They weren’t producing anything of their own in that field, so they were very welcoming.”

Whilst in Paris, Herman also worked in fashion and advertising and served as the European photographer for Playboy magazine. It seemed to me then that the pages of his life have always revolved around his search for personal pleasure, so I asked him this rather sheepishly.

“Sure!” he replies like a bullet. “How about yours?” I gasp for words. “What you’re doing now,” he says, “is something that you get joy, personal pleasure out of, yes? It’s not a question of the money so much as the accomplishment of it and the true satisfaction that you’re devoting your time to something that you consider rewarding and worthwhile. Some others may even agree with you. And that’s all there is: the pursuit of happiness; what the hell! What more is there in life?”

“Regrets? No, life is too short, man. As long as I keep doing and looking and searching and recording and creating, I have no regrets, none.”

Buy Posters at AllPosters.com

What are you up to these days? I ask. “I’m redoing a Bellacq series, if you will. I call him the Toulouse-Lautrec of New Orleans.” Lautrec befriended the prostitutes of Paris and drew and painted them. So, apparently, Bellacq did the very same thing in New Orleans in the 1900s but with a camera. “It keeps my juices flowing. I get all these naked ladies to parade in front of me with a camera in my hand, but that’s about all I can do.”

None of the women photographed for this project are prostitutes; “It’s not a series of ‘hooker photos’ at all,” he tells me. When you look at the images you don’t doubt it. You certainly don’t think ‘hooker,’ you think what a beautiful woman set against these untouched 200 year homes in New Orleans.

And do these women, these mothers and daughters and secretaries from your ‘Bellacq project’ know that you’re about to make them immortal? I ask, finally.

“Yeah, that’s the reason they come here,” he said.

Herman Leonard (March 6, 1923, in Allentown, Pennsylvania – August 14, 2010, in Los Angeles, California).

Pick up Jazz, Giants, and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard

Other books and prints of the photographer’s work can be purchased directly through the Herman Leonard studio.

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Paul Boakye

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