The Bathers
Photographs by Jennette Williams
with a foreword by Mary Ellen Mark

Winner of the fourth biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize

Mary Ellen Mark, Prize Judge





Description

Photo Gallery

Ordering Information

Exhibition

Press Coverage





Description

The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography presents the winning book in this important series celebrating American photography

“Jennette Williams’s photographs of women bathing portray the female form, but they transcend simple representation to speak powerfully about women’s own private sense of identity and beauty. It doesn’t matter that these bodies are not conventionally ideal — when these women are in front of Jennette’s camera, they are proud to reveal their full femininity. . . Jennette is both an excellent documentary photographer and a superb portraitist, a rare combination.

As in Ingres’s The Turkish Bath, Jennette’s lounging women not only revel in intimate feminine moments but in the camaraderie of women as well. They relax together, soaking in the steamy atmosphere. These hauntingly beautiful and iconic images of women are captured in extraordinary, magical spaces enhanced by wonderful light.”

—Mary Ellen Mark, from the foreword


“What makes for beauty in women? How do we as a society perceive women as they age? I began with what were simple intentions. I wanted to photograph without sentiment or objectification women daring enough to stand, without embarrassment or excuse, before my camera and I wanted my photographs to be beautiful. . . . I drew upon classical gestures and poses of Baroque and Neoclassical painters and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness, as if the older or ‘normal’ woman has always been a subject of the arts.”

—Jennette Williams


Jennette Williams’s stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease — floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.

Creating the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological aspects of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects: homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students. Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that not only invoke canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and to reflect on the allure of the female form.

Jennette Williams is a photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Williams has a master’s degree from Yale University and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the Bonni Benrubi, Robert Mann, and Opsis galleries in New York and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Her images have also been featured in such publications as Blind Spot and the New York Times Magazine, as well as in the book The Spirit of Family by Al and Tipper Gore. Based on her photographs of women bathers, Williams was chosen from three hundred entrants to win the fourth biennial CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Mary Ellen Mark has received international acclaim for her many books and exhibitions as well as her editorial magazine work. Mark’s portrayals of Mother Teresa, Indian circuses, brothels in Bombay, and her award-winning essay on runaway children in Seattle have confirmed her place as one of America’s most significant and expressive documentary photographers. Among her most recent books are Twins (Aperture, 2003); a forty-year retrospective, Exposure (Phaidon, 2005); and Extraordinary Child (National Museum of Iceland, 2007). Mark is a contributing photographer to The New Yorker and her work has been featured in LIFE, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Her many honors include a Cornell Capa Award from the International Center of Photography, an Infinity Award for Journalism, a Guggenheim fellowship, the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years; and the Matrix Award for Outstanding Woman in the field of Film/Photography.

See: Announcement of the fourth biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Competition

Photo Gallery

Ordering Information

Published by Duke University Press and CDS Books at the Center for Documentary Studies

96 pages, 11 x 13.75 inches
46 duotone photographs
Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8223-4623-4
$39.95
Publication date: November 2009

The Bathers is available from your local bookseller or by ordering directly from Duke University Press.

To order from Duke University Press:

http://www.dukeupress.edu

1-888-651-0122 (phone)
1-888-651-0124 (fax)






Exhibition

The Bathers: Photographs by Jennette Williams
Special Collections Gallery, Perkins Library
West Campus, Duke University
September 8–December 13, 2009

Opening reception and presentation
Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
Thursday, November 12, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Jennette Williams will talk about his prize-winning photography and sign books at the opening reception.







Press Coverage

The Bathers: Photographs by Jennette Williams featured in the November 2009 podcast from Daylight magazine and on multimediamuse.org






banner image:

Photograph by Jennette Williams



top