A small dark patch, dead center, is the first thing that catches your eye in Melissa Ann Pinney’s photograph Mother and Attendants Dressing the Bride. Pubic hair, mundane and verboten, it’s a magnet–the thing we’re not supposed to see.
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Since her college days, when she first learned to handle a camera, Pinney has redeemed her own experience by capturing it on film. Growing up in Evanston in the 60s, the oldest daughter in a family of eight children, she attended Catholic schools, drank in the visual richness of the church, and aspired to become a saint. Then came the falling away. For a time Pinney thought of the church as only “a crutch for people who are afraid–people who don’t want to look at anything.”
“I’ve always been interested in what’s left out,” Pinney says, “what’s not supposed to be talked about or seen.” Years before images of JonBenet Ramsey hit the tabloids or an expectant Demi Moore got naked for Vanity Fair, Pinney photographed somber four-year-olds in lipstick at a party in a beauty shop and the glowing globe of a friend’s pregnant belly, bared to be admired. Those images, Beauty Salon Birthday Party and Marcy and Kevin at Seven Months Pregnant, along with the Christ bride, are among the three dozen large color prints included in Pinney’s show, “Feminine Identity,” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
