creating space for conversation
With the website up, I was beginning to make progress. The conversation was unfolding. Topics were spiraling out—sexuality, sense of self, relationships—love, familial, with our bodies, with contraception, abortion, menstruation, violence, rape, basic human rights—it was beginning to feel like pretty much everything emerged from, or led us back to, the vagina.
What does this bring up for you?
I posted more questionnaires, included articles, links to websites, diagrams. It was a mishmash of stuff on the site, but in there, we were connecting with each other’s stories.
And, I was beginning to get the word out about making v-portraits. Women heard about the project from me, my friends, the website, or cards that I left in a few places around town where I felt at home, like Eve Salon7 or Bluestockings8 book store, or cards that my friends, or my Mom handed out, and some of them wanted to make a v-portrait.
The cards were great. For one thing not everyone was so online all the time quite the way we are now, so they were a way of reaching people. And, it made starting the face-to-face conversation a lot easier. Handing out a card with a description of what I was up to, rather than diving into a conversation that began with the startling word “vagina”, gave people a chance to acclimate. To decided whether they wanted to talk.
I started making cards about the project after my Mom told me that she was helping me find v-portrait recruits at her gym. In the locker room. She was asking women if they would like to make vagina portraits. I love my Mom. She is my strongest supporter. I asked her to hold off on recruiting until I had some cards for her, and quickly whipped them up.
I remember some of my friends were getting surprised by reactions from their friends, who they expected would respond either more warmly or more cooly to the subject. One friend of a friend scolded her for bringing up such an idea in front of other people. What would they think of her?!
My friend knew her friend to be comfortable with her sexuality and, because of that, figured she’d be up for posing.
I have yet to identify any kind of indicator for how a woman will feel about the subject of our vaginas or the making of v-portraits. It’s completely personal and specific. One of the things I’ve very much loved (after the fact) about this work is how it continually prevented me from settling into generalizations or sureness that I knew what people would say or think about it. If I wanted people to talk and feel comfortable talking about this, then I had to make room for everyone and every reaction. I had to be the open space.
Sometimes, the project would smack my head into the walls of my assumptions about people. People are icebergs. There’s much more that we don’t know about each other than that we do.
The women who have made v-portraits with me have nothing that I can think of in common, other than that they made a v-portrait with me.
They ranged in age from 19-60. They may or may not be comfortable with their bodies, or familiar with their vaginas. There were no requirements in order to pose, other than to be over 18. I don’t know what their sexual orientation was, or whether they’d given birth ever, or ever had sexual intercourse—unless it came up in conversation, and if it did, I didn’t make a note of it.
I didn’t survey them on the way in, or ask them to review anything on the way out. I hoped they would feel comfortable. I didn’t think about much else. I prepared the space for the shoot, blacked out the windows with lawn garbage bags and set up the crazy-bright lights.
Most of the women and I met for the first time when they arrived at my door to make a v-portrait. I never stopped being amazed by this.
Women were showing up and talking with me, making v-portraits, responding to questionnaires. We were having the conversation.
Because we were starting with such an intimate subject, it became easy—or at least common—to find ourselves having all kinds of conversations you wouldn’t typically have with someone you hardly knew, or maybe at all, during the photo-sessions.
I didn’t record any of it. There were no questions that I needed to ask. No one needed to do anything else. I wasn’t studying anything. I just needed to hold the space, and make images.
