On the shelf: The Bathers by Jennette Williams

by Amy Frykholm

After the birth of her daughter, photographer Jennette Williams found herself looking for new ways to understand her femininity. Her quest took her to traditional women’s baths in Hungary and Turkey, where she spent more than a decade working in extremely hot conditions with 35- millimeter film. Over time, she earned the trust of her subjects, collaborating with them on photographs about art and the female body.

Williams poses her question as largely an aesthetic one: “What makes for beauty in women?” Artists have sought an answer to this question using the female form as a symbol of beauty for millennia. Williams seems to find this tradition funny, inspiring and puzzling. She simultaneously uses it and challenges it in her photos, arranging real women in classic poses and breaking down the boundary between the real and the ideal. Williams’s women are “naked” more than “nude,” and they come in all shapes, ages and sizes. She is not interested in perfect proportions.

At the same time, the sepia tone of the photographs, the ethereal light and the tiled architecture of the bathhouses give the viewer the sense of entering a different world. Because of the mosaic tiles and the classical columns of the bath houses, the photographs have an almost mythic quality, and ordinary women take on the properties of goddesses.

These women are engaged in a traditional bathing practice that is at once personal and communal. In the photos, women lounge together, deep in conversation, a conversation that seems to have been going on for decades. The humanness of the women surprises, as does their easy camaraderie. I found myself studying their faces to read the stories they might be telling and to wonder about the private realms of thought and experience lurking there.

While Williams is interested in beauty, I found myself thinking more about incarnation. I thought of poet Scott Cairns’s words that Christianity is a religion not of transcendence but of “the reinspiriting of the body and its lowly matter—as manifested in the incarnation of Christ.”

In one powerful photograph, a woman is sitting on a bathing stool, shower cap on her head, turned away from the camera. All of the heaviness in the world seems to rest on her shoulder. Life, death, silence and eloquence emanate from her simple, almost helpless, posture. While in many of the photographs, I found myself wanting to be invited into this community, in this photograph I wanted to do the inviting. I wanted to reach out to the woman and offer a gesture of sympathy. I wanted to offer my presence as comfort.

That is the dynamic at work in these photos—a dynamic that crosses boundaries between the human and the divine, the holy and the unholy, the viewer and the viewed, the ordinary and the extraordinary. All of this contributes to a deeper understanding of incarnation. I found myself both “inspirited” and inspired, more whole and yet more aware of my brokenness. In a word: embodied.