Laurie Toby Edison is an internationally exhibited American artist, photographer, and visual activist. Much of Edison's photography is black-and-white fine art portraits. Her current project is . Her lifelong commitment to social justice informs all her work. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, including New York City, Tokyo, Kyoto, Toronto, Boston, London, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Beijing, Seoul, Budapest, and San Francisco. She has published two books of photographs: a suite of nude environmental portraits of fat women, and a suite of nude environmental portraits of a very diverse cross-section of men. Her photo essay of clothed environmental portraits of women in Japan is accompanied by bilingual essays from many of the models. Women En Large is featured in She and her writing partner Debbie Notkin have blogged about body image, photography and resistance at since 2005.
Early life and work
Edison was born in 1942 in New York City in a family of artists and designers. Her early influences include the beat movement, abstract expressionism, and jazz. Edison attended Wellesley College from 1958-59. A long-time resident of San Francisco, she lives in the Mission District. Edison identifies, among other things, as Jewish and queer. She says that her two daughters have been important influence on her work. Edison's early art was primarily jewelry and sculpture. She co-owned jewelry stores in Sarasota, Florida and Provincetown, Massachusetts during the 1960s. She began making sculptural jewelry in 1969, and later included mythic, fantasy, and science fiction designs. She became a feminist in the 1970s and moved to San Francisco - an epicenter of feminism - in 1980. In the 1980s, she taught herself photography as an art form better suited to her social activism. It has become one of her primary arts, though she has never stopped designing and making jewelry and sculpture.
Photography
Edison practices environmental portraiture, collaborating with her models to find settings which reflect their sense of themselves. They are frequently in the model’s home or garden, but can also be in natural or other outdoor settings. For instance, Edison's three photographs of Okinawan artist and activist Hanashiro Ikuko show Ikuko at her loom, at a sacred forest site, and in front of a fence around a US military base. The collaboration also extends to engagement with the communities from which the models come. Edison and Notkin spent ten years working among Fat Acceptance activists before the publication of Women En Large. Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes was published in 1994, and has sold over 10,000 copies. It contains 42 photographs and two essays by Debbie Notkin. It has been continuously in print for 25 years and is a basic text in feminist imagery classes in the English language. Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes was published in 2004. It features 59 photographs, not only portraits, but "extracts" and includes a wide variety of men of many ethnicities, sizes, snd abilities, ages 19–92. The keynote essay is by Debbie Notkin and Richard F. Dutcher, and the introduction is by masculinity scholar Michael Kimmel. Familiar Men entailed extensive outreach to different men's groups and individual men, as well as substantial research into masculinity. Photographer and commentator Tee Corinne said that Edison’s nude portraiture "is unique in focusing on the nude without eroticizing it." Women of Japan, a suite of 38 clothed portraits of women in Japan, from many Japanese cultures and backgrounds, was completed in 2007. Women of Japan required an especially deep collaboration with many Japanese feminists, including in gaining societal understanding, finding models, arranging exhibitions, and ensuring proper translations of the models’ written contributions. Professor Hagiwara Hiroko wrote an introduction. Notkin and Edison, with Kobayashi Mika and Rebecca Jennison, wrote an article for the Asia Pacific Journal, “Body Image in the US and Japan,” which discusses outreach in Japan, with references to their experiences with Women En Large and Familiar Men. Photographs from this suite have been exhibited in Japan, China, Korea, and the US. The complete Women of Japan project was shown at the Pacifico Convention Center in Yokohama in the fall of 2007. Edison's current work-in-progress is "Memory Landscapes: A Visual Memoir" - color iPad images that will create an aesthetic of time and memory. Edison says: Edison provided an audio quotation on Memory Landscapes for the Travelers Stepping Into the Unknown exhibit at the Nation Museum of Art in Osaka in 2018, curated by Karin Sander. A retrospective of one hundred of Edison's photographs “Meditations on the Body: Recent Work” was exhibited at the National Museum of Art in Osaka in 2001. Edison has photographs in the permanent collections of Gallery Fleur, Kyoto Seika University, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. The National Museum of Art in Osaka included her photographs in their 35th anniversary exhibition, The Allure of the Collection, in 2012. The Tate Gallery in London has purchased Women En Large for its Martin Parr photobook collection.
