Pat Taub
“My mission is to create a radical empathy for the older body. I want to expand our understanding of beauty and sensuality, which is not confined to the young.”
Jocelyn Lee’s new photography book, Sovereign, is the book older women have been waiting for: a book filled with photographs of nude aging women, proudly facing the camera with real bodies, showcasing puffy bellies, sagging breasts and, in one photo, a mastectomy. These women defiantly challenge the prevailing beauty stereotypes of the flawless young woman. Lee’s subjects own their bodies with the pride of lives well led. They are devoid of the body shame, which runs rampant among older women in our cuture.
Lee was fortunate to grow up with a sensual mother who delighted in being nude and in open displays of affection with Lee’s father. Sovereign is a love letter to Lee’s mother, celebrating women who continue to express their sensual nature into their old age. One of Lee’s favorite subjects, Jane, projects a bold sensuality that is so powerful it jumps off the page. Lee good humoredly comments, “My book is full of hot old ladies.”
Women remain sensual throughout their lives.
For over 35 years Lee has been making portraits of women and girls. In Sovereign she photographs her subjects in Maine’s outdoors: in the woods, on the beach and poised on rocks. Lee explains: “By placing my subjects in the natural world, the photograph calls attention to our corporeal existence, co-dependent among all living things on earth.”
Lee carefully chooses a secluded spot in nature, where her models have the privacy to take off their clothes. Lee describes the relationship between photographer and subject as a “collaboration of bravery.” She gives her models the space to feel comfortable before filming, taking her lead from them.
Lee uses a medium format camera on a tripod, a much slower process than the camera phone or digital image making. This style of photography necessitates long shoots, providing the opportunity for photographer and model to deepen their connection.
Jocelyn poised for a photo shoot
Sovereign’s images of women’s aging bodies are resplendent with a mature confidence and knowing impossible for a young woman, who doesn’t possess the life experience to project this complexity. By comparison a young girl’s body, taut and without the physical markers of living, can appear boring or one-dimensional.
Guardian columnist Lorraine Devon Wile weighs in similarly, “Youthful beauty is one kind of beauty. There are other kinds: the beauty of grace, acceptance, and feeling at ease in your skin. The beauty of wisdom, life lived, experience gained.”
When I asked Lee why none of her subjects were smiling, she replied, “Then they would be posing. I prefer a contemplative pose, which is more realistic than a smiling one.”
Lee’s subjects melt into their surroundings, floating languidly in the water, sunbathing on an ocean front rock, stretched out in the sand or in a bed of moss. I think of them as Goddesses of Nature.
Every older woman is a goddess in her own right. The art historian, Ginselda Pollack champions a new narrative for the older woman, framing it as one “where we encounter grace rather than the terror of time.”
After studying the women in Sovereign, I was inspired to look at my aging body in a new way where I can feel positive about it, aiming for the grace Pollack references. I stood naked before a full-length mirror, talking to my body, reframing all those parts I’ve hated. My sagging breasts carry proud memories of nursing my children. My crippled arthritic hands connect me to my mother with whom I share late in life arthritic fingers.
Thank you Jocelyn Lee for your commitment to making older women body proud!
For more information about Jocelyn’s work and her books: https://www.jocelynleestudio.com
.
