Body & Soul: Ten American Women by Carolyn Coman and photographs by Judy Dater (1988) is a nonfiction photographic book that combines compelling portraiture with the life stories of ten distinctive American women.
📘 Summary
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Portrait-Driven Narrative: The book profiles ten American women from diverse backgrounds — including a dog-sled racer, a solitary nun, a famous actress, a director, a Mormon mother who chose alternative schooling for her children, and others — capturing both their outward lives and inner experiences.
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First-Person Stories: Writer Carolyn Coman constructed the narratives from extensive interviews, shaping each woman’s story in her own voice to “make an unbelievable-sounding life understandable” and reveal adventure, struggle, and individuality within everyday existence.
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Photographic Exploration: Judy Dater’s black-and-white photographs accompany the texts, offering a visual expression of personality, emotion, and character. The images deepen the reader’s connection to each woman, emphasizing presence and dignity while extending beyond simple depiction to suggest inner life and soul.
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Diversity of Experience: Body & Soul highlights an eclectic group whose lives span a wide range of ages, experiences, and cultural contexts. Rather than adhering to a single unifying theme, the collection’s power lies in its celebration of individuality and the varied ways women navigate personal and social worlds.
Overall, Body & Soul weaves intimate first-person narratives with expressive portraiture to create a multifaceted homage to American women’s lives, moods, and identities, illustrated through Dater’s empathetic and skillful photographic gaze.
Judy Dater (b. 1941) is an American photographer, feminist artist, and educator best known for her candid, empowering portraits and nude studies that challenge traditional representations of female identity, body image, and gender roles. Born in Hollywood and raised in Los Angeles, Dater studied art at UCLA before earning her B.A. and M.A. in photography from San Francisco State University, where she was mentored by Jack Welpott (whom she later married and collaborated with). Emerging in the 1960s as a key voice in West Coast photography, Dater synthesized the sharp-focus precision of the Group f/64 tradition—inherited through her close friendship with Imogen Cunningham—with the provocative psychological depth of the feminist art movement. Her most famous work, Nehemiah (1974) and Twinka (1974)—a celebrated portrait of model Twinka Thiebaud posed nude in the woods beside an aged Imogen Cunningham—exemplified her knack for storytelling, vulnerability, and subverting the traditional male gaze. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, Dater has authored several influential books, including Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait (1979) and Body and Soul (1988), and her photographs are housed in major international institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
