Jennifer Loomis is a fine-art photographer and photojournalist, who is best known for depictions of pregnancy in art through photography.
Loomis was born in Connecticut but lived all over the world as a child and young adult. She has resided in Virginia, Indiana, and Kansas, while living internationally in Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and Kenya. Before becoming a photographer, Loomis was working in Annie Leibovitz's studio. There she witnessed a photo shoot of the pregnant Demi Moore to be featured in Vanity Fair. This photo shoot was an inspiration for Loomis to explore the beauty in the changing bodies of pregnant women.
By 2006, she had photographed over 1000 pregnant women. [1] Loomis compiled photographs to create a book, Portraits of Pregnancy, co-authored by Hugo Kugiya, a journalist. Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein, authors of Your Best Birth, claim, “Jennifer Loomis’s evocative and moving portraits of pregnancy are a joy to behold. The images will captivate you and the stories of these women’s diverse journeys to motherhood will touch your heart.” [2]
Loomis and her work as a pregnancy photographer have been featured in TIME Magazine, [3] CBS News, [4] CBS's The Morning Show, The New York Times, [5] The Wall Street Journal, [6] The Los Angeles Times, [7] the Associated Press, Fit Pregnancy, Pregnancy Magazine, NPR, Good Morning America, and Inside Edition, along with other media. [8]
Loomis has had her work included in a variety of exhibitions. [9] In 2004, her photography was included in the exhibition "We are Family: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Parents," at 2223 Restaurant in the Castro District, San Francisco. [10] In 2011, Loomis had her work exhibited in Perugia, Italy in a museum of contemporary art called Palazzo Della Penna. [11]
Portraits of Pregnancy:Birth of a Mother ISBN 1-59181-082-5
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose, was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Ricki Pamela Lake is an American television host and actress. She is known for her lead role as Tracy Turnblad in the 1988 film Hairspray, for which she received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She is also known for her talk show, Ricki Lake, which was broadcast internationally from September 1993 until May 2004. When the show debuted, Lake was 24 and credited as being the youngest person to host a syndicated talk show at the time. In late 2012, Lake began hosting a second syndicated talk show, The Ricki Lake Show. The series was canceled in 2013 after a single season, but Lake won her first Daytime Emmy Award for the project.
Vanity Fair is an American monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.
Eve Arnold, OBE (honorary), FRPS (honorary) was an American photojournalist, long-resident in the UK. She joined Magnum Photos agency in 1951, and became a full member in 1957. She was the first woman to join the agency. She frequently photographed Marilyn Monroe, including candid-style photos on the set of The Misfits (1961).
Peter Hujar was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits. Hujar's work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime, but he has since been recognized as a major American photographer of the late-20th century.
Boudoir photography is a photographic style featuring intimate, sensual, romantic, and sometimes erotic images of its subjects in a photographic studio, bedroom or private dressing room environment, primarily intended for the private enjoyment of the subjects and their romantic partners. It is distinct from glamour and art nude photography in that it is usually more suggestive rather than explicit in its approach to nudity and sexuality, features subjects who do not regularly model, and produces images that are not intended to be seen by a wide audience, but rather to remain under the control of the subject.
More Demi Moore or the August 1991 Vanity Fair cover was a controversial handbra nude photograph of then seven-months pregnant Demi Moore taken by Annie Leibovitz for the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair to accompany a cover story about Moore.
Gay Block is a fine art portrait photographer, who was born in Houston, Texas. Her work has been published in books, and is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) and the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Demi's Birthday Suit, or The Suit, was a trompe-l'œil body painting by Joanne Gair photographed by Annie Leibovitz that was featured on the cover of the Vanity Fair August 1992 issue to commemorate and exploit the success of Leibovitz's More Demi Moore cover photo of Demi Moore one year earlier. As an example of modern body painting artwork, it raised the profile of Gair in pop culture as an artist in that genre.
Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer best known for her portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and she is the first woman to have a feature exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.
Janette Beckman is a British documentary photographer who currently lives in New York City. Beckman describes herself as a documentary photographer. While she produces a lot of work on location, she is also a studio portrait photographer. Her work has appeared on records for the major labels, and in magazines including Esquire,Rolling Stone,Glamour,Italian Vogue,The Times,Newsweek,Jalouse,Mojo and others.
Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
What to Expect When You're Expecting is a 2012 American romantic comedy film directed by Kirk Jones and distributed by Lionsgate. It was written by Shauna Cross and Heather Hach and is based on Heidi Murkoff's 1984 pregnancy guide of the same name. Its story follows the lives of five couples as their lives are turned upside down by the difficulties and surprises of parenthood. It stars Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Chace Crawford, Brooklyn Decker, Ben Falcone, Anna Kendrick, Matthew Morrison, Dennis Quaid, Chris Rock and Rodrigo Santoro.
Sandra Eisert is an American photojournalist, now an art director and picture editor. In 1974 she became the first White House picture editor. Later she was named Picture Editor of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in its annual competition. She contributed to 1989 earthquake coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize for the San Jose Mercury News. As of 2012, she has her own business providing strategic planning for startups.
Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities. Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits. Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as “Laura”- a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person. Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism” for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.
Leslie Kee is a Singaporean photographer based in Japan.
Pregnancy in art covers any artistic work that portrays pregnancy. In art, as in life, it is often unclear whether an actual state of pregnancy is intended to be shown. A common visual indication is the gesture of the woman placing a protective open hand on her abdomen. Historically, married women were at some stage of pregnancy for much of their life until menopause, but the depiction of this in art is relatively uncommon, and generally restricted to some specific contexts. This probably persists even in contemporary culture; despite several recent artworks depicting heavily pregnant women, one writer was "astonished at the shortage of visual images ... of pregnant women in public visual culture". A research study conducted by Pierre Bourdieu in 1963 found that the great majority of 693 French subjects thought that a photo of a pregnant woman could not, by definition, be beautiful.
Lola Flash is an American photographer whose work has often focused on social, LGBT and feminist issues. An active participant in ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster.
Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.