| Laurie Toby Edison | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 5, 1942 New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Photography |
| Works | Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes (1994) Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes (2004) |
Laurie Toby Edison (born 1942) is an internationally exhibited portrait photographer. Her three suites of photographs include a series of nudes of fat women, a series of nudes of a very diverse cross-section of men, and a series of clothed portraits of women living in Japan. Edison's work is black-and-white fine art, with an underlying social change message, which she often phrases as "making the invisible visible."
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In 1994 she published Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, a black-and-white fine art photography book. Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes, also fine art in black-and-white, was published in the fall of 2003. She has recently finished Women of Japan, a suite of clothed portraits of women in Japan, who are from many cultures and backgrounds.
A retrospective of one hundred of her photographs “Meditations on the Body: Recent Work” was exhibited at the National Museum of Art in Osaka in 2001. Her photographs have also been exhibited around the world, including New York City, Tokyo, Kyoto, Toronto, Boston, London, and San Francisco. An exhibition of the complete Women of Japan project was shown at the Pacifico Convention Center in Yokohama in the fall of 2007.
A documentary about her work by John Wells is available on YouTube (see link below).
Among the dozens of articles about her work are a feature in NY Arts/Berliner Kunst by Lori Don Levan (May- June 2004); "Beautiful Men” (an article in English and Spanish by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin, with 14 photographs from Familiar Men, in Corpus, Vol 3 No 1, 2005; and an essay on Women of Japan with accompanying photographs, in Kyoto Journal: Perspectives From Asia (Spring 2006).
Photographer and commentator Tee Corinne said in a review in Afterimage, in 1994 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.” (interview with the photographer, 2007).
Edison says:
Just as Women En Large is my statement on the female nude, at least at this time, Familiar Men is my statement on the male nude. The five years I spent photographing men and talking with them have transformed my vision of masculinity in this time and place, as well as how I perceive the body in my work.
I first saw all my nude photographs, men and women together, in Kyoto in November of 2001. I realized that they are a single body of work imbuing the individual nudes with dignity and presence. Women of Japan, my first group of clothed portraits, had me grappling with all the issues from the previous two suites, from the position of a foreigner, and included the additional complex issues of Japanese identity.