how it began
I started work on vagina vérité® the summer of 2000. I didn’t see it coming. In fact, I had just quit my job in order to paint. And, I wasn’t painting anything about women’s bodies. Vaginas weren’t on my mind at all. I don’t remember what I had in mind at the time—just that painting was what I did, and something about a shade of cyan blue that I’m still chasing in and out of endless autobiographical images. I left my job and signed up for graphic design classes, figuring to freelance and paint.
Then, one day out of the blue, a friend asked me if I liked the way my vagina looked.
Apropos nothing. She asked me if I liked the way my vagina¹ looked.
We were meeting for drinks and just as my butt hit the barstool, she said “Do you like the way your vagina looks?’ It wasn’t something we had talked about before, our vaginas. But, there wasn’t anything we were supposed to, or not supposed to, be talking about, so, I responded—
“Yeh, I like it. Well, I never really thought about it in terms of liking or not liking the way it looks, but I’m fine with it. What brought this up?”
She did not like hers. There was something wrong with the way it looked.
Now, I knew that we were all different and that there was no right way to look, but I also knew that tone. Telling her that we were all different would not be enough. She really thought that there was a right way to look. And, anyway, I hadn’t actually seen any other women’s vaginas, just mainstream porn magazines [Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler] and I barely glanced at those, much less ever took a good long look at my own.
I knew nothing about this. But I knew that tone.
That there’s-something-wrong-with-me tone. Pained, resigned to it, outsider. Sad. And, that annoyed me. Not the tone, but that I could not respond to it with anything that would transform how she felt into something good-feeling, empowering, satisfied: at-home in her body.
I’m a fixer, a consoler, a caretaker. I hate it when anyone is in pain. I am. compulsively. helpful. And, even though I hadn’t actually seen any other women, I was sure that we were all different. Like any other body part, all different. Whatever I had seen in magazines was just the usual smoothed-out skin and re-shaping of that body-ideal that convinces us all that we’re too fat, too short, noses too big, breasts too small, and on and on. Very few women or men look anything like what I see in a magazine. Still, the images are mesmerizing, brain-washing and addicting. I was not immune. And, while I had my share of personal crap about my body, this wasn’t a body part that I worried about being good-enough: vagina diversity felt right to me. We were all different. And, I was, as it happened, satisfied with mine.
I tried talking her out of it.
But, really, what could I say? Without any evidence to show her how we really looked, what was the point?
Now, I was really annoyed! How could it be that the two of us could have spent a combined 70+ years on this planet, in our bodies, and not know what vaginas looked like??
This should not be happening. We should not be sitting here figuring this out. This should be BASIC. I decided right then that there should be a book. For women. So we could see what we looked like. If there wasn’t one already, I would shoot one². It would be called vagina vérité. Like cinéma vérité (which means “truthful cinema”; its a style of film documentary that is known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics). Only this would be a vagina photo-documentary.
OK. I had a plan. I would fix this. I saw the book in my hands. I knew exactly how the images in it would look. They’d be square and about eight inches. They’d be of the gyno-pose. They would be proud v-portraits. I don’t think I have ever responded to anything with such a complete end-vision like that. It felt totally right. I stopped trying to convince her, and promised to show her. We passed the evening talking about other things.
I don’t recall how much time I spent, nor where I spent it, looking for the book that would set the story straight—I really did think that someone else must have done this already—but I didn’t find it. It didn’t exist. Not the way I wanted it.
I had no job at that moment. which meant I was living off my savings until the freelance thing kicked in. Not a calm and easy place for me. And, now, I needed to buy equipment. I had a camera, but I would not use film for this. I could not involve a processing house in these images. Too expensive. And then I’d be relying on them to make perfect, dust-free shots. That would be endless work and expense. I needed a digital camera. And lights. This was in the summer of 2000, and cameras were more expensive then. I sat with this, hid from it, worried about it—for about a month. Then I remembered that this is what credit cards were for. I just had to do this.
