In an age where a wisp of pubic hair is enough to get you banned from Instagram, Anna Atanassova's new zine, Naked Pretty Women, shows naked bodies in their full glory. "Of all the things that I'm ashamed of, my boobs are the last of them," the Detroit-based activist and ALL-AROUND COOL GIRL told us in a recent interview. "There are so many more complex things that are worth hiding than your physical form."
Naked Pretty Women, which will debut this fall, hopes to combat both the oversexualization of women's bodies and the notion that nakedness should be censored. This isn't quite #freethenipple, though. Currently a print project, the zine was motivated by the strange and scary ways nude photos are often shared online, including one incident last year when Anna discovered naked photos of her and her friends on the message board AnonIB. By contrast, all the photos in Naked Pretty Women are published consensually. There's no reshooting, no editing, and no art direction. The point, she says, is that the women who participate show their bodies the way they want to.
Is it porn or art? That's the question a copy shop employee asked Anna recently when she called to inquire about printing her zine there. "I kind of laughed because that's the point. I don't think that it needs to be art or porn; I think that the middle ground is what's missing." Read on to find out more, and pre-order Naked Pretty Women HERE.
LISA JOHN ROGERS: Why Naked Pretty Women? How did this project start?
ANNA ATANASSOVA: There's this anonymous image-hosting site called AnonIB, and there was a thread in it asking for nude photos of me and a lot of my really close girl friends. People were either posting photos that weren't us––but saying things like "look at this score"––or posting actual photos that we sent privately. I thought that it was really fucked up and pathetic. The whole dynamic of [a nude photo] being some holy grail or coveted item, and some shitty, pixilated cell-phone picture is suddenly like a trading card.
I thought it would be an interesting shift if these photos were just offered up instead of being chased after. It's like, "Here, you asked for these photos. Instead of checking this forum once a week for three years, I'm just going to give you a picture of my tits... now what?" I've never felt more alienated in my entire life than seeing my name with question marks in front of it on an anonymous thread.
This zine is in part a reaction to Cards Against Harassment, a feminist project that recently went viral where a Minneapolis woman handed out cards to catcallers with messages like, "Don't make stupid comments about my body." What bothered you about Cards Against Harassment and what does Naked Pretty Women do differently?
I'm a white woman living in a highly gentrified neighborhood [in Detroit], and I have an issue with a white woman lecturing men on the street who are native to the neighborhood that she is gentrif