THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED ON October 14, 2014 BY Ashley Manta.
In celebration of Love Your Body Day, we wanted to share a story from someone who learned to love her own body. This article was reprinted with permission from sex educator Ashley Manta's blog.
I have struggled with body confidence my entire life. I've been 132lbs and I've been over 250lbs. One thing I found that was incredibly empowering for me was learning to be comfortable naked. I did that by working as a figure model for artists for a year, which culminated in me posing for a series of artistic nudes on camera. Since I believe in modeling vulnerability, I'm going to share those photos with you.
Figure Modeling
Being a figure model is hard work. You might think, "you just stand there naked, how hard could that be?" It's very hard. Keep in mind, people are replicating your body onto the medium of their choice--charcoal, paint, clay, etc. It takes time to do that, which means you need to stay in the same position. In a typical three hour class, I would do twenty minutes of one-minute poses (in various contorted positions to give them interesting things to sketch quickly) then a longer pose that I would hold for 20 minutes at a time for the remainder of the class. It was incredible. I would walk around during my break and see myself through the eyes of the artists who were capturing my body on paper, and it felt wonderful. There was no photoshopping, no shame. It wasn't just my body. It was art.
Live Modeling
There was an art expo in Mechanicsburg, PA where artists were creating in real time so that attendees could watch them work. I was hired to be a body art model, which meant that the artist was going to create a painting on my body and then I'd walk around to showcase it. I sat for about 45 minutes while the artist created an incredible Japanese geisha on my back, with a dragon kimono and surrounded by cherry blossoms. I wish I still had a picture of that, but sadly it was lost when my last computer died.
Once the the artist finished, I sat for a few minutes in front of a fan, waiting for the paint to dry, then stood up and walked around a room full of strangers, topless. They needed to be able to see my back, since that's where the art was. I was surprised that a place in South Central PA (know for its conservative values) was so permissive with nudity. It was glorious. I was complimented, many people took pictures of my back, and no one called me fat.
The Photo Shoot
About a year later, I met a photographer at an art gallery in West Chester, PA. I mentioned that I enjoyed nude modeling, and we exchanged contact information. A few weeks later, we scheduled a photo shoot at his studio. He was very kind. He gave me space to change (the first few shots were in clothes), he assured me that his wife was upstairs so that I felt more comfortable, and put on some powerful Madonna songs.
I was nervous at first. Doing the clothed shots helped me to get over the initial anxiety of doing a photoshoot (which felt a lot scarier than figure modeling for some reason!) Here is one of my favorite clothed shots:
Once I felt pretty warmed up, we moved to some shots with a white sheet draped around my body. The photographer liked to do cool things with light and shadow, which was neat to see once the prints arrived.
Once I was topless, the last frontier was to take off that white sheet and be fully naked. I was honestly less concerned about exposing my genitals than I was about exposing my tummy. I was so focused on it that I started to get into my head and panic. The artist was patient and kind. He told me that art does not recognize size or shape. It's all beautiful. Then I remembered my favorite painting,The Bathers by Renoir. The thing I love most about it was it is that it depicts a group of women who are playfully and unapologetically loving their bodies. I cast the sheet aside."Let's do this!"
To read the rest of the article and see more photos from the shoot, visit Ashley's blog. (NSFW)