Laurie Toby Edison is an American photographer born in New York. Since 1980s she has been working in San Francisco. In Japan, she has had solo exhibitions at The Third Gallery Aya, Osaka (2000), Gallery Fleur, Kyoto Seika University (2000), and National Museum of Art, Osaka (2001). In September 14- October 15, 2002 She stayed in Kyoto as artist-in-residence of Kyoto Art Center and showed her work in progress Women in Japan at the tea ceremony room of KAC. Here you read an excerpt of the dialogue featured on Diatext. Vol.8 "Slowness", January 29, 2003.

Hiroshi: When did you start your work as a photographer? What brought you to photography?

Laurie: In 1989. I had been doing political work involving size discrimination and size acceptance for fat women, and as I looked at the women, I realized there was a remarkable and very different beauty that had not been photographed before. It was really a desire to photograph these particular women that made me a photographer. Before starting photography I used to do sculptures of fat women, but it did not do what I needed.

Hiroshi: In what way?

Laurie: Well, one, artistically it was very beautiful, but it did not express what I wanted to say about the bodies, nor did it really reflect who they were. It was abstract because of the nature of sculpture and it profoundly lacked intimacy. And I realized what I needed to do was photographs. So I went to school and just took photography technique to be able to do that. Then Debbie Notkin, who wrote the text for Women En Large, and I were very involved with other women in social change work, and we decided to make a book. A book is a very powerful tool and a book that is not too expensive can travel in many useful ways.

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Hiroshi: I think there are many different ways to approach the topic of slowness. Though your photographic work is not directly related to this topic, I find a clue in them. The people in Familiar Men and Women En Large look very happy, relaxed and comfortable. I feel a slow flow of time around them.

Laurie: One of the things I'm working for in the photographs is a sense of deep time, of historical time, not just the moment, but a sense of the history of the people's lives. And that is slow. That kind of flow through time is not the very quick "I am photographing the moment and the moment is now". And when I photograph people it is not a fast process. I do not work quickly, either when I am photographing people, or when I'm printing.

Hiroshi: Do you spend a lot of time with people you photograph?

Laurie: I start with an introduction then I make an appointment to show them the work and discuss it. I like to give them a lot of time to think about whether they want to be photographed. If someone immediately says "yes," I still usually wait a month or so because I really want people to be sure that this is comfortable for them. Some people actually take a long time. One woman took six months to decide. So that part of the process is relatively slow. The actual photographing takes somewhere between three and five hours. I work with people at a slow pace, making sure that they are in positions that are comfortable and natural, and doing the composition. It feels like a gentle and relaxed process to me and I think that is more important than how long it takes. That kind of slowness is more a sense of rhythm than a sense of time. And then I don't print the next day. I print contact sheets, then I print working prints and I just like to let them sit and think about them for a while. When I'm sure I know exactly what I want, I do final prints.

Hiroshi: Are the people you photograph happy with the result?

Laurie: Most of them are extremely happy with the result. The women I photographed for Women En Large, with one exception, said that it was a completely transformative and positive experience and it really made them feel much better about their bodies and how they looked. That was true to the extent that when we asked women to write for the text, everyone wrote about how wonderful it was to be photographed, which was very flattering for me as a photographer. In Familiar Men, the majority of the men I photographed were happy with their photographs. One of the things I discovered in my work is the extent to which men are not comfortable with their bodies. But almost no one I photographed was unhappy with the work, and some men were extremely happy. I photographed a few men who had some things about their bodies that they were not comfortable with, and while they liked my photographs, it did not change their minds about the things they were uncomfortable with.

Hiroshi: How do you first get acquainted with people you photograph?

Laurie: Usually someone I know knows them, or works with them, and so I can be introduced to them. And often when I do slide shows, I'll say I'm looking for a certain look or a person from a certain background for my project. People will come out of the audience and say they would like to be photographed or they know someone who would be perfect and might like to be photographed. That is one way I'm able to meet people with whom I have no connection. The further along I am with a project, the more specific the diversities I need are, since I like my work to be very broad, so toward the end of a project very often the models will come more and more out of the slide show talks.

Hiroshi: It's interesting to know the process of making photographs takes such a long time, because I think many would imagine taking a photograph, unlike painting, as a quick process. Like in a scene of making a commercial photograph, we see a photographer shooting a lot of pictures in a very short time.

Laurie: That's true. And Women En Large took five years, and Familiar Men took five years. One thing is there are so many things in my life that take time that are not directly involved with taking photographs and printing them. I mean slide shows, exhibitions, and the many other things that compose my life. But the other thing is really how it works for me. The work would be very different if it took two years. When I started Women En Large I thought it would take two years and I thought two years was a long time. But it took five and I think five years was really the right time because the way I was looking at the work after two years was not at all the way I was looking at the work toward the end. The work was much more complex and much better. I'm always making a book or an exhibition in my head so in a sense it's like a collage. So you can get the photographs to make a certain kind of shape, and then you start making the more complicated shapes with the later photographs. So the long time to do the work is really important.
When I started Familiar Men, I foolishly said it would take two years, it would not be complicated. I started Familiar Men because Women En Large was my "take", not only on the fat nude but the female nude. So I decided to do the male nude. And at that point I was really thinking much more artistically than politically. I just decided I wanted to do male nudes. And as I started to do the work I realized I had involved myself in the entire complexity of the subject of masculinity and the work proceeded to evolve in very different ways than I had expected - much more complex and much broader ways. And it took five years.

Hiroshi: How did your own view of your work change over those five years? Did you make important discoveries while doing the work?

Laurie: Yes. What I was doing in Women En Large, was really learning about myself as a photographer. When I was doing Familiar Men, two things were going on. One, my work was developing more complexity because the subject of masculinity is so layered. I looked at the male nudes and discovered that some of them had these wonderful, smaller pictures inside them. So I created extracts, with the idea that at some point I would know what I would do with them beyond their just being art in themselves, individually. And then as the work developed, I also made enlargements of some of those extracts, making them the same size as the actual portraits. When I was finished, I had with four different kinds of photographs: my small portraits, larger versions of some of them, the small extracts, and then the enlargements of the extracts. And it was the patterning of those that enabled me, visually, to discuss the complexity of masculinity.
But also as an artist, having my work develop these more complex patterns was very important. And again, interestingly enough, I hadn't thought about it this way, the artistic development in my work in Familiar Men was very much driven by the fact that it was a complex subject and I needed to discover more complex ways to present it visually.

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Hiroshi: What was the reaction from Japanese audience, especially from male audience who saw Familiar Men? Was it different from one you had got in the US?

Laurie: A lot of men were made extremely uncomfortable, but then some men had the same reaction that a lot of men in the United States have, which was that the work made them more comfortable about themselves.
When I initially showed the work in the U.S, I was showing it to audiences who were familiar with my work or were politically progressive and the response to the work was very positive. The response from women was that it was so wonderful to see men who looked like men they knew. To see real men: men who were husbands, lovers, grandfathers, or sons. The response from men was a mixture of discomfort, because one is not used to seeing real men in the nude, and a really good feeling that it made them more comfortable because seeing men like themselves looking relaxed and looking good was very powerful for them.

Fairly early on I arranged to show work to an audience that did not know my work and wasn't expecting to see it. And we arranged it so that there could be some time to talk after the presentation. The reactions I got were very positive. More women talked than men at first, which is usual. Some women came over to me and told me how much they liked my work. Then about twenty minutes later, just as I was thinking it was time to go, all the men came over and started to talk to me. And they all told me how much pain they were in about feeling like they weren't real men, and that they did not measure up to this very narrow American standard of masculinity. And since this was early in my work, I knew men were in pain about this but I had no idea the depth of the pain. It was really very informative and very good for the understanding of the development of my work. That was all probably within the first year. So that was the early information - a mixture of the fact that it made many men uncomfortable, it made many men feel much better about themselves

Hiroshi: I like Familiar Men because it shows male bodies in familiar, comfortable situation, and at the same time it represents the complexity of masculinity. I think this very feeling that masculinity is complex is important in our society today. As many people seem to think that masculinity is simple, like a stereotypical "macho" thing. The stereotype may look a little different in cultures, but the belief in the simplicity of masculinity seems to be shared by most men.
And I think the complexity of sexuality is an issue in Women En Large, too. It represents bodies of fat women, but I feel it is not about a group of women having a certain physical characteristics, but about the complexity of femininity itself.

Laurie: That was my goal. And it is very complicated. Take the matter of class for example. The myth in the United States is that we are all one class. But the class issue is invisible because it is never discussed. The Europeans have an elaborate vocabulary for discussing class. We don't have any. Class is one of the languages that the body carries. The body carries many messages. Clothes are the obvious class marker. So it was one of the things particularly important for me to be aware of. It is one of the complexities that is paid very little attention in my country. The week after I started these photographs I started reading biographies of men. The five years I was doing this work I was constantly reading biographies of varied diversity. All these things feed my work but I never think about any of them while I'm doing the work. It's as if one part of my mind accumulates the information and a completely different part of me takes the photographs. It's a very internalized process. And I came to think of it as "slow".

Hiroshi: The class issue is rarely discussed in Japan too, in art as well as in any wider community. The majority of men seem to think they all belong to the same class, the class of "salary-man" or of office workers. Here the "simplicity" of masculinity can be represented in their uniform-looking suits and ties. The uniform implies the body's belonging to the society, the industrial society which values speed and efficiency. And this gives them a secure feeling of strength, a collective strength of industry rather than a direct physical strength of "macho" body. In this context I think the reason some Japanese men didn't like looking images in Familiar Men is that they didn't like facing their individual bodies undressed from their social connection. The uniform clothing represents the power, speed and efficiency of masculinity, while, in a way, the undressed individual body reveals slowness. Some men don't like to see slowness of their body. I mean, here masculinity is understood in terms of a power in the society, which is shown through a certain kind of cloth. But this is not limited to Japan.

Laurie: Yes, that's true. Constant working does not allow you to "be present" in your body. Being physically aware of who you are and "being present" in your body requires a certain kind of time and a certain ability to be at ease in your body. And if people are in the kind of machine life, one way of coping with that (and I think men do this more than women) is by separating themselves from their bodies. So that they are their work, they are their clothes, they are what they do.
Doing Familiar Men I learned a lot about men's clothes and what they represent. Our ideas of recognizing who you are by what you wear are very varied and complicated. In doing nudes, I never expected to learn so much about representations of clothing. It was very powerfully true that when you took clothes off and you could no longer tell what a man did, people found that very confusing. Because men in the U.S. are so totally identified with what they do, and when you take the clothes off a man and do a portrait in the nude, you can no longer tell what his profession is. You can no longer tell where he fits. In public, on the street, men are always "reading" each other for signs of status, while they are "reading" women for signs of availability. So it really makes male nudes a different way to see men.

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Hiroshi: How about nudists? Have you got any reaction from them to your work?

Laurie: I have actually worked with them. The people I've spoken with like Women En Large very much. Nudists are accustomed to seeing the diversity in human bodies in a way that in the U.S. no one else is. They liked Women En Large because it showed real bodies. And showing nudists the work is interesting because for them the nudity is not important. It was a very interesting and very different experience. For them the diversity and the reality of the bodies are important. But they are completely comfortable, whether they are men or women, with the idea of the nude. But they also feel very much starved for images of real bodies. We live in an image-oriented society, and most of us feel some cultural dependence on imagery to confirm the ways we see the world.

Hiroshi: Women En Large really gave me a chance to rethink the issue of femininity. For, in mass media, I have felt we can only find very limited, obsessively uniform representation of femininity. Femininity is always something seen by the masculine eye. In such a condition, I think we sometimes encounter femininity only when we see images of large women, or old women, because they more or less escape the eye of the male...

Laurie: I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "femininity". In the U.S. it is almost impossible to say "femininity" without referring to the narrow, stereotypical meaning of the word. The media image of "femininity" basically means sexy young women. And it shouldn't mean that. Even though "masculinity" is a very narrow box for individual men, it is associated with a very wide range of images: from construction worker to Prime Minister, across a very broad age spectrum. Debbie Notkin and I are always struggling because we can't pair the two words, "masculinity" and "femininity." One of the things we are talking about is that it would be nice to reclaim the word "femininity" in a way that would give it the breadth of the word "masculinity."

Hiroshi: We have the same stereotype about femininity in Japan, too. Femininity is understood almost exclusively in a sexual way. It is very hard for the young women to get any different view over their bodies. If you want to be feminine, you have to be sexual.

Laurie: We have something similar, but it is more extreme here. I think in the U.S. you have the same barrage of needing to be thin, needing to be beautiful and sexual, but here the barrage that is explicitly sexual is much heavier than it is in the U.S. And it is very difficult for women.

Hiroshi: There are political and commercial forces to restrict femininity in a certain meaning.

Laurie: There is the strong combination of the political forces that would like to take away what power women have, and the market forces that want to make women deeply unhappy with the way they look because it is such an economically successful policy for selling things. It is very difficult to fight against them. I don't know if you have it here, but they have made girls in the U.S. who are nine years old a commercial market for looking sexy. So they keep making it younger and younger. Do you have that here also?

Hiroshi: Yes we have.

Laurie: It was scary enough in when it was directed at teenagers but now they are directing it at pre-teenagers as well. It's a way of making them a market. It's a way of telling a nine-year-old-girl she needs to be feminine. It isn't as explicitly sexual, but it is sexualized. Like cute, tight little clothes, makeup kits for five-year-olds to use at home.

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Hiroshi: You said, compared to femininity, masculinity is allowed wider range of images about what a man should look like. But still, many men feel the socially accepted image of masculinity is too narrow for them to identify themselves with. So, some men are tired of pretending to be "masculine" and trying to feel themselves more comfortable in alternative ways. How do you think about the men's movement?

Laurie: We have a real men's movement in the U.S. The problem is the expression "men's movement" got taken over by men who want to reclaim the stereotypical image of masculinity by going into the woods, beating drums, and affirming some kind of internal power which makes them become "more masculine." They took that name away from men who simply wanted to become more comfortable with who they really are. We have a lot of people who are involved in that. They are in what we would call the progressive community in the U.S. There are a large number of men who are working on these issues and care about them deeply.

Hiroshi: How do they call themselves?

Laurie: Now that the masculinity movement took away the name "men's movement," there are specific movements such as Men Against Violence who are working very strongly with issues of male violence. That's a very good group. The media has taken the women's movement words "be all you can be" and made it into a makeup commercial. And the negative masculinist movement has done that with both the words "men's movement" and "men's liberation". So whereas here, in Japan, "men's liberation" means men who are trying to change themselves to be more comfortable, in the U.S. "men's liberation" means men that are trying to be more conventionally masculine.

Hiroshi: Is that so?

Laurie: Yes, they've managed to take over those words and turn them inside-out. And in the media they have taken over both of those words, unfortunately. So men would just call themselves "progressive" or "feminist" or they may belong to a specific group, like Men Against Violence. That group started out as men who were trying to recover from being violent against their women and children. They formed support groups to change to stop physically oppressing women and children. Out of that grew a whole social movement in various cities in the U.S.

Hiroshi: It seems to me that, in the US, masculinity is more closely associated with physical strength of men. In Japan, such a direct representation of masculinity is hidden under more abstract images of speed, efficiency or competence in work. Being fast in decision and able to work for long time is thought to be important for men. In this context, liberation from masculinity would mean liberation from this required fastness and hardworking. To be "slow" is one way to stop being masculine. Laurie: People work much harder and many more hours now in the U.S. than they used to. It's a combination of the fact that our economy is not as good as they have pretended it to be for a long time, which means that everybody has to work. Women cannot stay home. And the fact is that people work long hours for the same money. Salaries have actually gone down in the U.S. in the last thirty years. The bubble economy, also, made working all the time a virtue. Before that you were supposed to finish your work and go home to be with your family and friends. But during the bubble, you were always supposed to be working. People still work harder than that here, in Japan. But it is a transformation that I do not like. San Francisco used to be a much slower place and that was why I liked to live there, but not since the bubble. I mean, it's still better than many other places in the country. But this sense that work validates who you are, and the more you work the better person you are is much too common now in the U.S. Too many young men during the bubble didn't have other lives anyway and were happy to work many, many hours because they had nowhere to go.

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