Chubby Nudists

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Chubby Nudists
Is nakedness invisibility’s opposite? Maybe not, but, if it’s unapologetically displayed, it can be a kind of antidote to erasure.
“Bebe on Sand,” 2014. Photographs by Jocelyn Lee
“Deborah at Aquinnah Beach in September,” 2020.
“Nancy at 78, Maine at 18 (Aunt and Grandniece),” 2018.
“Nancy Floating at Quitsa Pond,” 2016.
“Judith at Home,” 2009. Photographs by Jocelyn Lee
“Bebe and Pagan in the Red Room,” 2004.
“Bebe and Pagan Pregnant with Twin Girls,” 2012.
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Some clichés about the cycle of life are true. When you are raising young children, the days are long and the years are short. And when you’re a woman, you will, at about age fifty, become invisible. All our lives, as girls and younger women, we prepare ourselves to be looked at. We grow accustomed to registering —to attracting, evading, or denouncing the male gaze. In “ Mrs. Dalloway ,” Clarissa, newly aware of herself as a woman of a certain age, walks down the street thinking, “This body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all.” The cultural critic Akiko Busch, quoting that line from “Mrs. Dalloway,” notes that “a reduced sense of visibility does not necessarily constrain experience.” True, but it takes some getting used to, and when it’s punctuated, as it often is, by condescension—when strangers are suddenly addressing you not even as “Ma’am” but, with a verbal wink, as “young lady”—you may not want to get used to it.
Is nakedness invisibility’s opposite? Maybe not, but, if it’s voluntarily, unapologetically displayed, it can be a kind of antidote to diminishment and erasure. A nude portrait of a woman older than, say, sixty is an unusual image—even a taboo one. To make such photographs, and, even more so, to pose for them, is an act of defiance. In the course of her career, the photographer Jocelyn Lee has been drawn to nude bodies of all shapes and ages. Her latest book, “Sovereign” (Minor Matters Books), features a selection of her photographs of women who range in age from their mid-fifties to their early nineties, posing naked, frequently outdoors and in natural settings.
Lee’s color images of older women are painterly, classical, but also frank. Skin puckers, crinkles, and sags. Bellies poof and pleat. A silver-haired woman stands knee-deep in a pond strewn with autumn leaves, looking directly at the camera, her elbows angled back like wings to reveal one intact breast and one mastectomy scar. A naked woman sits on a blanket of moss in the woods, her breasts and belly soft, so at ease she might be napping. In “Nancy at 78, Maine at 18,” a woman and her grandniece stand nude on a beach. Side by side, their long-legged, curly-headed bodies rhyme, but also remind us of the ways time will remake our familiar, corporeal selves. The image is not some grim memento mori, though. The women lean comfortably toward each other, touching shoulders; the younger woman’s arm loops through the elder woman’s. Behind them, the sea and sky are a light-suffused blue.
Lee, who is fifty-nine, lives part of the year on a lush, wooded property outside of Portland, Maine. She’s taken some of the portraits of older women at a pond near her house, and others on beaches at Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere. The natural settings, devoid of sociological detail and inherently beautiful, tend to banish ironic readings and extend a certain benevolence to the naked subjects. We aren’t in paradise here—nobody in these photos looks that naïve—but we are not in any sort of judgment-laden social space, either. Lee told me that she hoped the locations implied the warmth of sun on the body—“that kind of comfort and love”—and communicated the idea that we are “all essentially sensual creatures.”
“The camera can be very cruel depending on how you use it,” she said. “There’s a whole tradition of photography that’s based on criticality and cruelty. Diane Arbus —whom I love, by the way—looked for unflattering moments to create a sense of drama. Sometimes that can be done with the juxtaposition of elements in a space, the exaggeration of the appearance of wealth or poverty, harsh lighting.”
Lee said that, by contrast, her work had sometimes been criticized for being “too earnest or romantic.” But she made her peace with that a long time ago. Through her photography, Lee has always tried to understand “what lay ahead.” When she was still in college, long before she had children herself, she photographed a pregnant friend in the nude as part of her thesis project. “This was before the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover; people didn’t really know what a pregnant woman looked like,” she said. Through the years, she took many nude photographs of her mother, who, she says, had a remarkable ease in her own skin. Lee continued taking pictures of her as she was dying of cancer.
I’m about six months older than Lee, and, all in all, I consider aging to be far better than the alternative, as my own mother, who died at sixty, the age I am now, used to say. Still, I prefer the cloudy mirror in my bathroom to any in which I can see myself clearly. The older women who posed for Lee in the nude include professors, writers, artists, an astrologer, a hospice worker, and a small-town mayor. To me, they seem very brave, but it bothers me to say so. We all have bodies; if we’re lucky, we all get old, or at least older. Why not show what it looks like?
Two of Lee’s subjects, Judith and Nancy, have been posing for her for decades. Both told me that they don’t love how they look in some of the images, but that they treasured the experience of making them with Lee, whose process is creative and collaborative. Nancy, who is eighty, said, “I cringe when I look at the images, but I know that when I’m ninety I’m gonna say, ‘Ooh, look how great I looked!’ ” Her grandniece Maine, who posed with her, is a photography student. Maine told me that Lee’s image makes her happy because her grandaunt and she look so alike in it. “It’s like seeing myself in sixty years, and I sort of love that,” she said. “I think Nancy is beautiful.” Lee told me that she plans to photograph the pair every year.
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When it came time for Cathy Bartlett-Horwood to drop her dressing gown to the floor and stand naked in her village hall in front of her friends, she was nervous. The 60-year-old has had a complicated relationship with her weight for many years. She was so nervous, in fact, that she was physically sick beforehand.
Nevertheless, she persisted. Bartlett-Horwood became part of a group of brave women who’ve come to be known as the "Wonders of Whimple." The "wonders" are thus-named because they posed naked in the village’s most scenic spots for a calendar celebrating the beauty of the village's female population.
This calendar is more than a photographic paean to the female form. It’s a fundraiser for this village's year-long mission to change the way its residents feel about their bodies.
The village’s name is one you might not have come across before, for the village itself is deep in the heart of rural Devon—a county in the south west corner of England. Readers imagining a scene not unlike the idyllic filming location of the 2003 film Calendar Girls wouldn't be entirely off the mark.
Whimple is comprised of winding lanes dotted with thatch-roofed whitewashed cottages with the occasional farm thrown in for good measure.
But, beyond the chocolate box prettiness of the village, its 1,173 inhabitants have been working hard to acknowledge and embrace the beauty of their own bodies. It's by no means been an overnight flick-of-a-switch process for many of the people involved. 
Gill Wilson— an eating disorders therapist—is the woman behind the movement. It all started in January 2016, when Gill organised screenings of a documentary in the village called Embrace (opens in a new tab) .
The film—created by Australian activist Taryn Brumfitt after a successful Kickstarter campaign—explores the issue of "body loathing" and aims to inspire people to change the way they think and feel about their bodies.
"After having my three children, I ended up hating my body," says Brumfitt in the documentary. "So I trained hard, and I'm standing there in my perfect body and I’m not happy." Brumfitt says she didn't want her daughter to grow up feeling the same way so she traveled the world to find out why so many people hate their bodies. 
Wilson’s decision to screen the documentary in the area is one backed up by research. According to Dove’s Global Beauty and Confidence Report, which surveyed 10,500 women from around the world, British women have one of the lowest self-esteem scores, and just 20 percent said they liked the way they looked.
Alarmingly, a 2016 report by the Children’s Society found that girls are “less happy than they used to be” about their physical appearance. The research found that more than one-third of UK girls are unhappy with the way they look, a 30 percent rise over five years.
Wilson says that after she put on two screenings in the village, people came forward with ideas to further the notion of embracing one’s body image. One of which was a calendar.
“I was getting loads of emails, and the biggest messages was that the film needs to be shown in schools, but you need a licence for it to be shown in schools,” says Wilson. But, the idea of the calendar presented a solution to the licence issue—the proceeds raised by the Wonders of Whimple could pay for licences. 
Word of the calendar spread through the village, and slowly but surely people came forward and signed up to take part in it. “Once people knew their friends were doing it, they’d say 'oh, if you're doing it, I'll do it,'” says Wilson.
This was exactly how Bartlett-Horwood came to be involved in the calendar. “I knew some of my friends were taking part, and I thought, hey why should I just tell them how proud I am of them when I can actually do it too!” Her photo now sits pride of place on the calendar’s February page, and she’s also on the front cover.
“I have spent years battling with my weight and worrying how I look in front of my family and friends,” she says. “But, why when I am healthy and happy I have wonderful people around me who love me for who I am and it is inside that really matters.”
Bartlett-Horwood wants other people to feel the way she feels and “not to be worried about what other people think.”
“Allow your real self to shine and feel comfortable with who you are,” says Bartlett-Horwood. “We are all fabulous.”
Her bravery—and that of the women who took part in the calendar—has not gone unnoticed in the village. “People I don’t know have recognised me from the calendar and hugged me,” says Bartlett-Horwood.
Suzanne Rothwell, 72, decided to take part in the calendar for reasons close to her heart. A grandmother of six, Rothwell says she’s seen her grandkids starting to worry about body image from a very young age.
“My 5-year-old granddaughter one day said she couldn't do something because people would see her tummy. How sad is that?” Rothwell says. She feels that children are “constantly bombarded” with images of “perfect people.”
So Rothwell posed nude in an orchard along with other women from the village.
“It was great fun taking part, everyone was being quite modest taking their clothes off and putting on their dressing gowns,” says Rothwell. “Amazingly, when we finished the shoot and went to get changed, most ladies just undressed without worrying about their nakedness.” 
The women of Whimple posed in nothing but their birthday suits betwixt apple trees in an orchard, beside scones and jam at the local cricket club and, of course, on high stools at the Thirsty Farmer.
“We were keen for the calendar to get a real cross-section, and to get a diversity of body shapes,” Wilson added. “We ended up having a young girl of 18 and a lady of 84 years of age.”
Wilson says that most of the women felt “empowered” after the photo shoot.
“Everybody's journey was different, and people were fairly tentative to start with,” says Wilson. “I can’t speak for other people, but I was in the calendar and I felt really empowered, really liberated.”
She said that some of the experience couldn’t be “put into words” as it was “such an unusual experience."
"The shoot that I was in was in an orchard and it's not every day you take your clothes off and stand in an orchard," says Wilson. 
Sue Draycott, the photographer behind the Wonders of Whimple, says the experience of shooting the calendar was “amazing.”
“The women were all incredibly supportive of each other and I found it was a real bonding experience for all of us,” says Draycott.
The first screening of the film was what made Draycott decide to get involved in the calendar. “I have always had my own body image issues and struggled with my weight so when I heard that Gill was showing the film Embrace I knew this was something I had to see,” says Draycott.
“It was such an incredibly moving film and really struck a chord with me,” Draycott explains. She says that, during the screening, she realised that social media plays “such a big part in the way we see ourselves.”
"Having a teenage daughter also played a big part in the way I was struck by this film,” says Draycott. 
Draycott didn’t just stand behind the camera during the shoot, thought. “I joined one of the groups for a shoot and then took a self portrait of myself (naked of course!) for the back page of the calendar,” she says.
“I am so glad that I got involved and honestly feel I am on my way towards a better self acceptance of my body,” she says.
The calendar has raised around £4,000 ($5,414), which will be go towards five licenses and the remainder will be donated to two breast cancer charities. For Rothwell, the calendar also served as a way to remember her father, who died from breast cancer. 
Cathy Bartlett-Horwood, second from right, who was so nervous before now proudly sits on the throne.
"The calendar has raised enough money to get the film into five of our local secondary schools. So, they'll all be screening it next term," says Wilson.
Wilson hopes that women will look at the calendar and think "she looks like me, I can relate to her."
“I want someone to feel it's relatable and to appreciate that we're all beautiful with our stretch marks and cellulite. We've got amazing, amazing bodies, and it makes me really sad that so many people go through life hating their bodies and feeling they should look a certain way.”
Wilson says that she feels the calendar is already starting to have an impact in the community.
"It's one of those things, it's not going to be a flick of a switch and 'oh my god I love my body,'" she says. "The way change happens is little by little.” 

'Disarmingly intimate' photos of women
(Image credit: Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos )
An exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles festival features work by three female photographers who each capture revealing and rarely seen images of women.
When you look at them today, you realise how topical and relevant they are now – Clara Bouveresse
You see the variety of bodies, the flesh, the skin, the hair, the wrinkles, the scars – Clara Bouveresse
Heyman’s images show us, again and again, how rarely women are portrayed as they really are in the media, even now
The US photographer Susan Meiselas first began shooting women who took their clothes off for a living in 1972, when she was in her mid-20s. Travelling around New England, she’d encountered the country fairs that toured rural parts of the northeastern US; many had a ‘girl show’ tent, where women danced in striptease acts. Meiselas was fascinated. Over the course of three summers, she haunted the fairgrounds, befriending dancers and sneaking backstage to capture what their lives were really like . She also recorded hundreds of hours of interviews. In order to blend into the crowd and get the shots she needed, she sometimes dressed like a man.
The book Meiselas eventually produced, Carnival Strippers (1976), has become a classic . Unsparing but sympathetic, both humane and abjectly sad, it showed a world many at the time preferred to ignore: one in which women danced nude for handfuls of dollars, in tawdry, spit-and-sawdust tents erected in one-horse towns. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about the work is that Meiselas gives the story a complicating twist. We might expect a sob story – a tale of exploited, objectified women in an exploitative, objectifying industry. Yet Meiselas finds nuance in the biographies of the women who danced, along with remarkable amounts of self-awareness and courage. One says that performing is her path to financial independence; another that the carnival has given her a home when she had nowhere else to go.
“It was a complex story, and I wanted to show it in its complexity,” Meiselas tells BBC Culture. “Not everyone was expecting that.”
Forty-three years after it came out, Carnival Strippers is the centrepiece of an exhibition at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival . Entitled Unretouched Women , it reunites Meiselas’s photo essay with two other books from the same period by American female photographers, both canonical in their way. One is the publication that gives the show its title, The Unretouched Woman (published the same year, 1976), in which Eve Arnold, a pioneering photojournalist, compiled portraits she had taken of women around the world over the previous quarter-century. The third is Abigail Heyman’s Growing Up Female (1974), which describes itself as “about women, and their lives as women, from one feminist’s point of view”.
All three books were their authors’ first: a chance to make their own creat
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