A new project!

I have been tossing this idea around in my head for a while and it is just now coming to fruition so I figured it was time to share. I have been doing the 365 days project on Flickr for several months now and if you look at my set of self-portraits, it will become clear rather quickly that I tend to only take pictures of my face. I've been thinking about this and it occurred to me that I do that because my face is the part I am most familiar with. I see it in the mirror every day. I experience my face largely the same way that everyone else does. The rest of my body, however, is a different story.

I know my belly and my thighs and my arms and my feet from how they look from a very specific perspective, looking at them from my own eyes. Sure, I have seen myself in a full length mirror before, but the amount of time spent looking at and familiarizing myself with my body is far outweighed by the time spent looking at my face. Anyway, I think that many of us go through life being unfamiliar with our bodies. We see photos that others have taken of us and there is a disconnect because the person in the photo doesn't look how we thought we looked at all. It's clear, then, that an important step towards body love and acceptance is to become familiar with our body parts, especially the ones we aren't so fond of.

To that end, I have started a new Flickr project, called Love My Parts. The idea is for everyone out there to pick a part of your body that you're not entirely familiar with or that maybe you don't like so well and take its portrait. Be creative. Get several shots from different angles or with different lighting. Show your whole body with this one part highlighted or just show the part by itself. My hope is that in the course of this portrait-taking and evaluation we will all become more familiar with and more able to recognize the beauty in these parts of ourselves.

Click here to go to the group and join! I got us started off with some lovely belly photos.

xo!