This Is Who I Am: Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes
by Rosanne Olson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rosanne OlsonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN: 1579653634
Number of pages: 116
Publisher: Artisan
Book Reviews of This Is Who I Am: Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes
Book Review: 54 Naked Women
Summary: 5 Stars
Rosanne Olson has created a great book for men who love to look at beautiful women. In this five year long labor of love is a work where men are almost not mentioned. But for their eyes. My take is that any man who has ever wanted to connect intimately with a woman--as a lover, mom, daughter, friend--should own this book. Each page is a woman's black and white story about her own body, how she feels about living there. My favorite awful line in the book is where one woman says she viewed her body pretty much over years simply as a taxi cab for her mind. Ouch.
The book is comprised of photographs of 54 naked women. As an ontologist and philosopher it came to me as I turned pages like a song more than a book. It showed up like a chorus of the divine feminine almost, a collective voice addressing the historical and sad mind/body split of the Gnostics, the Manichean, Western thought from Augustine forward.
The book is filled with awful and wonderful words and personal histories. Below these photos of women in various stages of brokenness and wholeness and undress are their own stories in their own words. Women of all ages here from teens to age 95. And shapes and nationalities and backgrounds. Each speak a short narrative about themselves and their bodies, what they see when they look in the mirror. Most are draped artfully in some soft, see through sheet of gauze or fabric, adding a touch of mystery. Indeed, as the saying goes, a woman is never so naked as when she is a partially clothed.
Each subject touches on her own core bodily self, about how she feels about living there in that flesh and that bone. Thus the title: This Is Who I Am. I found the work a simply wonderful mediation about that icon of beauty and attraction that is the female form. This was indeed for me a work on the meaning of persons; a spiritual work on the union and communion of persons.
A priest tried to guilt me at confession once over spending healing time at a naked retreat center near my home. A friend decided to rat me out and the clergyman threatened to withhold communion and absolution unless I abstained from these weekend trips. I declined and held firm. I'd love today to walk his celibate yet well meaning naked butt through Olson's book, page by page and ask him to show me anything but purity of heart.
As a bookophile and a once amateur black and white photographer back in college--and as a lover of a few women along the way--I was struck by how many others did what I did; read, looked, took in half and went out to buy another copy for a daughter. Another for a niece who's having a baby. Then another for my own library. Good to see that so many moms and therapists and family members are doing the same. But let's not forget the dads and the men!
With some fear I plan to share this book with my men's support group; to lead a discussion among a dozen male friends while opening these photos of women naked, asking ourselves what it all means, why we look. I will do it with a Playboy in my left hand and this book in my right. Indeed what power for good or ill we wield as men, as those who pursue and look and love and want and father children with these women. Yes, Olson helps us ask what it means that beauty is pursued so, fixed so at the root of creation energy, female energy, self image energy.
To my priest friend who tried to guilt my eyes a decade back, I'd admit sex is in this book someplace but I'm not sure where. These women and their images and their bodies and their comments on their bodies are at once art and soul and spirit and person here in Olson's work. And theology. Makes me want to know these women--these persons--at a deep and personal level. A book for soul folks and lovers and philosophers all.
Summary of This Is Who I Am: Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes
Fifty-four portraits of women that are striking, beautiful, and real. The bodies in this book have been shaped by the full sweep of the feminine experience.They belong to 54 women from all over the country, ages 19 to 95, of all sizes and shapes, ethnicities, and life experiences, who were willing to expose their naked physical forms in This Is Who I Am. They are ordinary women only in the sense that none is a professional model. They are in all other ways extraordinary?courageous, curious, thoughtful, speaking unflinchingly about their bodies, then allowing themselves to be photographed to inspire other women to make peace with their physical selves, "to glorify the real beauty of all women."
Certainly, the feminine nude form is not new to artists and photographers. But the portraits in This Is Who I Am, taken by award-winning photographer Rosanne Olson, with a steady, unjudgmental eye, speak loudly to the American obsession of feminine perfection?slim hips and full breasts, high cheekbones and tiny waists, taut skin and eternal youth?and even more loudly to the way real women, with real bodies and real lives, look.
By turns tender, personal, and moving, this tribute to contemporary womanhood is the perfect gift for mothers to give to daughters, daughters to cousins, cousins to friends.
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