Brave nude world
Jennifer Toole’s bold photographs of female nudes represent a desire to capture raw beauty and combat what she calls an ‘epidemic of insecurity in women’
Jennifer Toole’s photographs are sometimes captured in the first light of day. The soft glow of sunrise has long been a cherished time for photographers. But with Toole, it’s more about cover for her “guerrillastyle” outdoor photo shoots, a safe time for her subjects to get naked.
“You can get away with a lot at the crack of dawn,” she says. There was the time Toole and a woman named Demi ducked security guards and jumped the fence at Ontario Place. The result — enshrined on a bold website Toole helped launch, Herself.com — is a celebration of the human body in its prime. Demi stands like a naked statue on a slab of rock, her body strong, certain and ready against the vastness of the lake.
More recently, dawn saw another of Toole’s female subjects posing at the top of bleachers at Exhibition Place, dressed only in sneakers. Spread out from her back are a huge pair of wings. She is Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. Toole plans a three-metre-high print for her Jan. 25 exhibit of nude goddesses at Parkdale’s Only One Gallery.
“These are strong and very brave women offering their likeness as an example of natural beauty.” JENNIFER TOOLE
“There is not much that is more beautiful than a woman’s body,” she says over lunch at a downtown hotel.
Nudes have been the subject of photography since the camera’s invention in the early 1800s. Along the way, women who have elevated the craft to an art form include Julia Margaret Cameron, Diane Arbus and Mona Kuhn.
Thirty-year-old Toole’s ambitions are no less lofty, particularly when popular culture seems bent on distorting the body’s pure form. Beauty is Photoshopped, surgically enhanced and objectified. Women feel diminished by comparison, and Toole wants to confront that with her work.
“I always had the desire to remedy this epidemic of insecurity in women,” the Toronto-based photographer says.
“Kylie Jenner reconstructed her entire face before she was 18 and just launched three lipstick colours that made millions of dollars in a day. What kind of lesson is that for teenage girls?”
Toole’s message is serious, but her photos have a playful quality. Her nudes are having fun. They flaunt their self-image, no longer captives of what feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey called “the male gaze.”
The concept created international buzz early in 2015 when Toole teamed up with Australian actress Caitlin Stasey to launch the website Herself.com. It showed nudes of Toronto-area women, identified only by their first names. Toole photographed them in natural light with medium-format film, giving the raw and unadulterated images the texture of a painting.
“These are strong and very brave women offering their likeness as an example of natural beauty,” Toole says. “It’s a celebration of individualism in women.”
In lengthy interviews conducted by Stasey, the women described everything from their sexual awakening to their views on love. The site attracted so much traffic it crashed on the first day. It has expanded to include the work of six photographers based in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and more than 4,000 women have volunteered to tell their stories and pose nude.
“The project has mostly resonated with young women who are brought up in a world that does not implore them to love themselves as they are,” Stasey says in an email exchange with the Star.
“Honestly, without Jennifer, Herself would have floundered,” Stasey adds. “She brought to the project many women willing to be documented, and not only that, she made them feel valuable and comfortable. Have you ever had to ease someone’s essence out of them while they’re stark naked on a frosty Toronto morning? She is a true wizard.”
Toole’s latest nude photo series is a response to Boko Haram, the Nigerian extremist group responsible for kidnapping and raping hundreds of girls. Her idea is to combat the deadly misogyny the group represents with supersized iconic images of strong women portraying goddesses in Greek mythology.
She plans to print 30 images, each three metres tall. Architect Katy Mulla is designing a lightweight structure, like a portable museum, to showcase the pictures. Toole hopes her travelling exhibit might one day land in Nigeria.
It’s an expensive vision, but Toole enjoys being loud and thinking big.
“I’ve only just begun,” she says.
A fateful bottle of wine
When precarious jobs make life miserable, Toole takes comic comfort in how fat squirrels and raccoons get from Toronto’s garbage.
“No matter how bad it gets, at least you’re never going to starve,” she jokes.
She was born on a ranch in Plantation, Fla., a small town near Fort Lauderdale. She moved to Toronto with her mother — soul and jazz singer Jeanine Mackie — at the age of 3. She loved to play the French horn but instead chose to study musical theatre at Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough.
“I figured music theatre would be less specialized,” she says, laughing. “How many French horn players are there in any given society? Maybe one?”
In 2007, she graduated with a degree in creative writing from Montreal’s Concordia University and landed a $15-an-hour job at an ad agency in Toronto. To help pay the rent, she also waited on tables at Terroni restaurant on Adelaide St. Her workday stretched from 8 a.m. to midnight. That winter, she got pneumonia twice.
Hoping to confine herself to one job, she asked her ad agency for a raise. Her boss responded a week later by asking her to train two new interns. After she did, he fired her. She became a waitress full-time.
One night in 2008, she sipped wine at the Beaver Café on Queen St. W. with a woman who had started dating a photography student. He wanted Toole’s friend to pose nude, and Toole cautioned that the pictures might end up on the Internet. The friend agreed it was a bad idea, but the notion of posing nude intrigued her.
“By this time the bottle of wine has diminished and I’m like, ‘I’ll (shoot) it for you,’ ” Toole recalls. The two met days later in Toole’s loft and she snapped the pictures with “a poor-quality point-and-shoot camera.” Toole entered the photos in two competitions and won. One prize was an exhibition where, much to Toole’s surprise, one of her prints sold.
The friend who posed nude was less thrilled. She convinced Toole to get the print back from the buyer. “It all got bigger than both of us very quickly,” Toole says.
She waitressed for the next three years while teaching herself photography, helped by YouTube tutorials and three photographers who agreed to act as mentors. When she had $10,000 saved, she leaped full-time into her new career.
She talked Northbound Leather, the Toronto makers of fetish wear, into being their “house photographer.” For two years she shot “super sexy” images inspired by the work of Helmut Newton. She later became house photographer for Toronto private club Soho House, whose manager introduced her to Stasey.
“She’s one of the few people I’ve ever met with ambition that didn’t come at the expense of her warmth,” Stasey says.
Three of Toole’s images have been published by Vogue Italia, perhaps the world’s top fashion magazine. In December, she spent a week in Los Angeles shooting properties for a landscape architecture firm and building its website. She landed back in Toronto to repack her bag and head to New York, where she photographed two upand-coming opera singers at the Juilliard School.
On the way back, at Pearson airport, she met up with her partner, violinist Edwin Huizinga, a member of the Toronto rock band Wooden Sky and a founder of the “Classical Revolution” movement, which brings live chamber music into cafés and other unlikely settings. He was returning from a gig in the U.S.; they hadn’t seen each other for six weeks.
“The hustle is real and it’s every day,” says Toole, who describes competition in Toronto as “cutthroat” and relaxes with hiphop dance classes four times a week.
“You have to find a way to be creative and carve yourself a niche as an entrepreneur in whatever you want to do,” she says, adding with a laugh: “Right now, I’m taking all jobs.”
“The project has mostly resonated with young women who are brought up in a world that does not implore them to love themselves as they are.”
CAITLIN STASEY TOOLE’S CREATIVE PARTNER