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Bodyscape Photography – Kim Keith
A woman walks into photographer Kim Keith’s studio. “I want to look beautiful,” the woman says before she takes off her clothes. Kim’s motto ‘every body’s beautiful’ is more than just a catchy tagline. Kim’s main photography focus is bodyscapes. She shoots in black and white working with lighting and angles to show people the abstract beauty in their bodies that they often overlook. She literally transforms bodies into landscapes that puzzle and intrigue the subconscious. She asks her clients two questions ‘what part of your body are you most uncomfortable with’ and ‘what part of your body, curve or line, do you or your significant other like the most.’ With those answers, Kim sets about capturing the parts, both good and bad. She does this to show people how to view the beauty in those parts of their bodies they see as ‘ugly.’
“It’s amazing how women describe their bodies,” says Kim “they use words like mutilated, mangled, scarred. They need someone outside of themselves to show their beauty to them in a totally different way, in a way where even they don’t know what they are looking at.”
Kim faced her own camera back in art school. Her interest in nudes was born of her self-consciousness surrounding her body. She grew up in the Bible belt where modesty was highly regarded. Women weren’t supposed to show off their bodies. For an assignment Kim decided to face her fears by doing a nude self-portrait. “I wanted to see what would happen when I pushed my self up against a boundary,” says Kim. The response was amazing and not just from the students. The professors had nothing but praise for the image. “Every time I shoot a nude, it confirms this is a good thing,” says Kim.
Kim has shot women with mastectomies and double mastectomies. While her general practice is to shoot only bodies – no faces, she has broken that rule twice. Once was photographing a breast cancer survivor. The woman was around 40 and just had a double mastectomy. Her husband had left her. As she undressed, she said ‘I’m ready for this face to be associated with this body.’ The photo shoot was a teary one for both Kim and the woman.
The second time she broke her rule was on a recent trip to Africa where her images of children orphaned by AIDS and local villagers captured a universal pain and need for love. “Looking into their eyes, they say so much with their eyes. It’s easy to get stuck on the suffering and how little they have on which to survive. That’s any easy place for me to go,” says Kim, whose own life has recently experienced loss. This winter Kim will seek to resolve some of the pain through images dealing with abandonment and destruction.
Over the last year, Kim took a leap out of the studio and into nature. In an effort to push out of her comfort zone once more, Kim decided to create collages based on story. Her first collage was inspired by a story from Ovid. Other shoots have included visual metaphor such as when she photographed body parts in a broken mirror, shattering perceptions, literally. A broken body, a broken image.
In a stirring collage, a woman floats death-like in a river, a torn note floating alongside her with two flowers one bright red and the other bright yellow. The image portrayed Keith’s perception of Virginia Wolf’s suicide. Kim was intrigued by Woolf taking her own life to let other people be free of her. “Woolf killed herself to let her husband off the hook, to give him freedom from her. It’s very powerful to put rocks in your pocket and walk into water,” says Kim. The flowers at the time were subconscious as many images are until Kim has time to process them. Now looking back, she sees the flowers as the life Woolf gave her husband as well as a memorial, an easing of pain and hurt. The flowers became the play between life and death.
Kim only photographs women now. She used to shoot men, but she became really uncomfortable with the situation men would put her in. She felt she was losing her artistic freedom. When she tried to photograph men and they talked inappropriately to her or had a hard on or semen dripping from their penises, her defenses went up. It negated her freedom as a photographer and hindered her approach to art and her ability to approach that person professionally. She was no longer an artist, she was a woman.
“I want to look beautiful,” a woman had said to Kim. When she came back to view the images of her, the woman said, “What is that? That’s a beautiful photograph. That’s not me.” The woman ordered five prints to hang on her wall so that some day she might be able to reconcile the beauty of those images with the painful image of herself she has carried around for a lifetime.
About the Author
Undiscovered Earth is a resource for Exploration, Environment, and Expression. Undiscovered Earth is a voice for those who love the outdoors, nature and the environment and features profiles wedding venue , product reviews and poetry, fiction and essays.
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