Naked Old Black Women

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Naked Old Black Women
Why these women over 50 happily got naked in front of a stranger
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Kerrie O'Brien is a senior writer, culture, at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Connect via Twitter , Facebook or email .
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Getting your gear off in front of a stranger is not something you do every day. But a new exhibition of women aged over 50 photographed naked demanded exactly that.
Melbourne photographer Ponch Hawkes has shot a stunning black and white series of older women in the raw, resulting in a joyous representation of bodies in all shapes and sizes. Called 500 Strong , the exhibition celebrates womanhood generally and those featured specifically, breaking the bizarre taboo that suggests bodies of this ilk should not be seen.
Older women’s bodies are celebrated and, significantly, seen in the show. Credit: Ponch Hawkes
While Hawkes says “most couldn’t give a hoot” about stripping off, others were slightly anxious, but all agreed it was an important thing to do. “It’s embracing the body whatever shape and size you are really.”
A callout via word of mouth and social media asked women across Victoria to get involved and the response was overwhelming. Hawkes shot the portraits in Melbourne, Geelong and Shepparton and found groups of friends came together, while others attended solo, their underlying motivation similar.
Women in all their glory are celebrated in the show. Credit: Ponch Hawkes
“Because they thought older women shouldn’t be excluded from the visual archive of our lives,” says Hawkes. “We don’t know know what the normal process of ageing is with women because we don’t see any images of them.”
Older women often speak of feeling invisible, of hitting middle age and finding their presence diminished. Even in art, representations of women beyond a certain age are limited.
That lack of visual documentation has negative health effects, Hawkes says, shutting down women having a comfortable relationship with their bodies, as well as a practical impact, making it harder for them to find employment.
“We are still held to the standard of young, size 6 models in fashion magazines. While there’s more diversity in the colour of people’s skin and their backgrounds, they’re still very skinny and very young.”
Participants could opt to remain anonymous, using a range of props to cover their faces, from fans and books to fruit, footies and saucepans, animal masks and seaweed; one even brought a chandelier.
Asked how they felt about the photo shoot, the women expressed everything from pride and fearlessness through to being thankful for their bodies. “At this age I am in my glory. I hold a lit chandelier because they throw glory”; “The fan is for hot flushes, the tattoo reflects making my mark and the flowers for a head and heart full of bloomings.”
Photographer Ponch Hawkes shot hundreds of women naked for her new show 500 Strong. Credit: Justin McManus
One woman photographed said she googled ‘old women’ and ‘old men’ and found a thousand, mostly negative words, to describe older women, and only eight to describe men.
“As you get older, you want to say ‘I’m still here’,” says Hawkes. Among the participants are several women who’ve had mastectomies, others with double mastectomies and reconstructions.
Participants could remain anonymous by using a prop to cover their face - animal masks were popular. Credit: Ponch Hawkes
The show is part of a broader event called Flesh After Fifty , the name a quote from movie star Joan Crawford, who at that age reportedly demanded a photojournalist shoot her naked, saying “Something happens to the flesh after fifty.”
It is the brainchild of Martha Hickey, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, who through her research into menopause found women tended to think of that stage of life as an ending, rather than a beginning. She hopes to shift the narrative around older women and challenge many of the assumptions made.She makes the point that women over fifty will soon be the largest sector of society.
Lead curator Jane Scott says Flesh After Fifty is about promoting change in attitudes about what constitutes a healthy body image. “Older women are in need of the opportunity to celebrate their bodies and young women are in desperate need of positive images of mature women to alleviate the fear and misgivings they have about ageing.”
Across five weeks, Abbotsford Convent will host talks about positive ageing, physical safety, life post-COVID and mental health; films; circus and dance workshops; performance, comedy and dinners. Hawkes’ 500 Strong is a centrepiece of the event – and a world first.
“I didn’t realise that when I started doing this. It’s a really daring experience and a really trusting experience, that they would come to me,” she says. “Basically what this is doing is honouring women.”
Flesh after Fifty runs from March 4 til April 11 at the Abbotsford Convent. See fleshafterfifty.com.au
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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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