Nude modeling revealed
March 7, 2009 at 11:58 am by Shawn AlffKathleen Rooney uncovers her experiences as a nude model in her new memoir, Live Nude Girl: My Life as an 
Object. Living in the Boston area, Rooney was a poet, professor, and author, but still had to pad her earnings with nude modeling for six years. It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only writer who gets naked for an audience, but I’m a bit jealous that she actually got paid for it.
She’s a smart woman inhabiting a comely body, and she wastes no time taking it off at the top of her book: “The first thirty seconds of nudity are always the most jarring, charged for me and for those who are looking at me. The disrobing is a gentle shock, a surprise, a kind of eyewash, and the instant is electrified, more vivid than those that preceded it and those that will come after.”
Rooney examines nude modeling from every angle: historical, sociological and biographical. She explores the territory between female beauty and intelligence, art and pornography, object and observer – even the border between life and death – with insight and passion.
She balances the life of “Phryne” – a modeling sensation of ancient Greece – with Madonna’s nude photos for Lee Friedlander. She explains Greek vs. Judeo-Christian approaches to nudity and highlights the difficulty people have distinguishing art modeling from
Read the rest of this review written for the Los Angeles Times
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