She began to take nude self portraits of herself when she was 23: she placed her old Zenit in a corner, got naked, put the clothes in front of her and took several pics. She didn’t know yet about lighting, so those photographs are not great… but they mean a lot to her because they are her first shots nude.
She grow up in a time & in a culture where nudity was a horrible sin, a shame, the ruin of the soul, Hell. She couldn’t live with that threaten, she had to free her soul from that claustrophobia, so she took those pics alone and promised herself that she would keep doing that all her life.
Months later, she attended a photographic course, and she met a really talented young lady who proposed her to take some wild shots of her. She never knew that she could look so dark, so dangerous, so unknown. Pure black & white paper prints reflecting her soul at that time.
When she got pregnant, she waited for the right time to take pictures of her body full of life. She has never developed them, she’s seen the tiny shots in the film, and they are beast. Maybe one day she’ll be back to the dark room and work on them. They scare her. They are not particulary wild, but enough for her & her feelings.
She obviously tried the experiment of taking nude pictures of her and her loves, but she gave up doing that because it was too painful for memory later on, she realized, she realized, she has never done it again, pictures can be neddles for emotions.
Her body changed. The camera changed to a digital one. No more paper prints, just images in the screen of a computer. The skin, the tits, the bottom, the belly, the legs, her arms… getting older, facing time. No shame, woman, do it as you promise your self. 35 years old, 37, 40… 41…
Are all these pics sex related? She is not quite sure, but society seems to be. To be really honest, she doesn’t know…
As far as she knows, everybody fights somehow with their images of themselves nude. Everybody faces the mirrow. The images that the media sells us as the right nudity command us to fit our bodies to what’s in. I suppose that another reason she takes nude self portraits is because she wants to know her body over those other images & find her own beauty, her own uglyness, her own look. She must say that watching movies in which you can see Cuba women being proud of her bodies helped her a lot to be confident & fuck the standards. The most beautiful women in the world are in Cuba, everywhere, happy in their female bodies, pura sandunga.
She finds funny that her body has always taken the shape of her mother’s. She dedicates the picture below to the woman who gave her birth & invited her to life.
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