Me and my pony “Lady,” age 4 or 5.

Where does our selfconscious nature come from?  As children we are able to present ourselves to the world without shame or fear of judgement; we dance, laugh, sing, and create unabashedly.  But at some point we begin to lose this freedom, and we start to consider how others might view us.  At what age do we realize that “someone may be looking?”

A few weeks ago, I saw a spot on The Today Show about New York photographer Jordan Matter.  Over a period of six years, Mr. Matter took hundreds of photographs of women in a wide range of situations, all topless and bare breasted.  (A quirk in New York State Law allows that it is legal for women to go topless in public; afterall, men certainly have this provilidge.)  He then combined these wonderful photographs with essays and interviews from the women into a book titled Uncovered: Women In Word and Image.

Beautifully portrayed in these photographs, women of all shapes, ages, and sizes bare their breasts in conditions ranging from a blinding city snowstorm to The St. Patrick’s Day Parade to the back of a motorcycle.  These women seem so free, so liberated, so unselfconscious in these pictures, one has to wonder what it would be like to be in such a situation.  And since Mr. Matter said in his Today Show interview that many of the women were reluctant to cover up immediately once the photo shoot was over, I have to believe it must have felt pretty darn good!

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in this world of criticsm, self-doubt, and fear, we could take just a little piece of that freedom, that pure joy in existence we had as children and apply it to our everyday lives?