Photographer turns tables to celebrate mums’ beautiful bodies

A truly inspiring book is letting mothers regain control, says Claire O’Sullivan.

HAS the fightback against impossibly beautiful, photoshopped images of size-zero woman begun in earnest?

Just weeks after the ‘no make-up selfie’ craze convulsed social media and divided the sisterhood on whether make-up was a feminist statement, women brandishing the scars of childbearing are now getting their five minutes of fame.

For the past decade, magazines and newspapers have subjected us to an onslaught of images of new mums such as Victoria Beckham, Liz Hurley, or Myleene Klass looking pre-pubescent yet with a plump six- or eight-week old baby propped on their protruding hipbones.

The result of this? Something else for women to beat themselves up about. But now it seems real mums want to wrest back control.

A Beautiful Baby Project is the brainchild of US photographer and mum, Jade Beall. It started off when Beall posted black and white photographs online of herself semi-nude. Thousands of mums ‘liked’, retweeted, and shared the images while hundreds more went to the bother of writing to her to ask if she’d take similar portraits of them.

The end result is A Beautiful Body, a book to be published later this year which shows up to 100 mothers with jelly bellies, caesarean scars, boobs floppy from breastfeeding, and stomachs lined with silver stretchmarks. It also tells their stories, how they feel about their bodies after giving birth.

“I have heard hundreds of stories now,” says Beall. “Anorexia, childhood bulimia, the mother of a woman told her she was too fat to be a ballerina, self-hatred, self-suffering. Feeling unsexy because she perceived her nipples as imperfect, feeling unsexy because she lost too much weight after breastfeeding. Feeling like there was something deeply wrong with her because she had only lost five pounds nine months after the birth of her second child.”

The book was also published by crowdsourcing, with Beall asking women if they wanted “future generations of girls to build healthy body-image and self-esteem” and if they wanted to build an “ad-free media platform that doesn’t digitally augment women’s faces and bodies”.

According to Beall, A Beautiful Body is only the first stage of her project.

“My intention... is to continue on with other A Beautiful Body volumes such as beautiful women facing aging, beautiful women dealing with cancer, beautiful young women facing eating disorders, and beyond,” she says.