The Bathers

Jennette Williams's stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease--floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.

To create the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul C zanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres's Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological associations of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects--homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students. Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that evoke not only canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and reflect on the allure of the female form.

A CDS Book
Published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Photography

Jennette Williams is a photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Williams has a master’s degree from Yale University and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the Bonni Benrubi, Robert Mann, and Opsis galleries in New York and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Her images have also been featured in such publications as Blind Spot and the New York Times Magazine, as well as in the book The Spirit of Family by Al and Tipper Gore. Based on her pictures of women bathers, Williams was chosen from three hundred entrants as the fourth winner of the biennial CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Mary Ellen Mark has received international acclaim for her many books and exhibitions as well as her editorial magazine work. Mark’s portrayals of Mother Teresa, Indian circuses, brothels in Bombay, and her award-winning essay on runaway children in Seattle have confirmed her place as one of America’s most significant and expressive documentary photographers. Her many honors include a Cornell Capa Award from the International Center of Photography, an Infinity Award for Journalism, a Guggenheim fellowship, the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years; and the Matrix Award for Outstanding Woman in the field of Film/Photography.