(View in landscape on phones) – 2023 and 2024.
Ah hello body my old friend! I see you in the mirror every day and we’re in it for life and yet sometimes I can be so unkind to you! Too fat! Too scarred! Too ambiguous around gender!
I have moments when I realise that I love you so much and I feel bad for putting you through all the shit I’ve put you through.
I have, in many ways, an uncomfortable relationship with my body. Like so many I have fallen into the hell-hole that is the eating disorder mindset. I am in recovery from atypical anorexia binge/purge subtype.
I am also transgender and experience difficulties in my relationship with my body around that. I call myself non-binary, that is the closest I can get to describing the messy beautiful thing that is my gender.
That’s the thing – bodies are messy and beautiful and we need to embrace it and celebrate it. We all have our hang-ups, our imperfections, our insecurities.
Sometimes in my experience it is precisely those imperfections that really manifest the beauty.
It would be terribly terribly boring if we all looked the same. There is a beauty in diversity.
There are things that help me. Knowing when to treat yourself (freshen up the lingerie drawer), practising active gratitude such as writing a list of your favourite parts of your body and what you like about them, seeing other naked bodies and being exposed to diversity, having sex, putting on your favourite track and having a good dance.
I am learning to love things about myself that I once hated. My curves, my hips and arse, my vagina, my scarring, partly from surgery, partly from self-harm. These are bits of me I never thought I’d be able to love.
I am immensely grateful to have been able to take part in this project – taking and, particularly, looking at these photographs has been a challenging but immensely fun and rewarding experience.
Fox’s Offering –
My offering is one of my favourite pieces of art – a copy of ‘Ophelia’ by John Everett Millais. It depicts the moment in Hamlet when Ophelia, mad with grief, falls into a river whilst climbing a tree to gather wildflowers. Mad as she is, ‘as one incapable of her own distress’, she floats for a time and sings snatches of old songs, until inevitably the glassy waters pull her down ‘to muddy death’. The painting is the moment when she is singing.
To me, there is something heightened, erotic even, in her pose – the open hands and lips, the blush of the red poppy she clutches. It is the moment just before death and, as the French recognised in the expression la petite mort – the sensation of post-orgasm as likened to death – there is something erotic in that moment.
It is a beautiful painting. On the back I wrote a haiku inspired by the painting and it felt good to do some more creative writing.
The haiku is a little hard to read in the photo and says –
“Ophelia a haiku –
Suicide, pale-faced
Among broken-backed flowers
Rue for remembrance”
2024
These new photos were taken at the same time as ones with Colette.
Since I last had photographs taken for the Ages project, I have aged just a little more.
In what feels like a big step, I have finally conceded victory to my receding hairline and braved the shave. The result feels colder and more punk than expected.
It reminds me that I am now approaching middle age, the fine lines I have begun to notice round my mouth and eyes. I was alarmed when I first noticed them, but on reflection they feel like something to celebrate, too, as like many people I’ve found that I have become happier as I age.
A decade ago I cared too much what people thought – I would never have had naked photographs taken, or any sort of photographs, really. I have so few pictures from my 20s and I regret that.
These photographs were an enormous amount of fun to take, and I think that shows in the images –
I will look back at these with fond memories.
Join in by contacting me via my contacts page.
Phil Pool - Art and Protest 