"True Beauty - Womanhood in Washington D.C." is a photobook in tribute to the spirit, heart, and sensuality of womanhood in Washington D.C. with personal stories from the women profiled, forewords by Sandra Beasley, Winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize and tribute paintings/ illustrations by noted D.C. artists DECOY, Randall Holloway, Anna U. Davis, Matt Sesow, and Graham Jackson
Proceeds from the sales of the photobook will be used to fund a medical vehicle that goes to underprivileged communities to provide free breast cancer screening exams
To order the photobook (120 pg., 11"x14", 3-process color) with a credit card or Payal (securely processed by Paypal), please click on -Order and Donate-on the left menu
*** the first 100 purchasers of the photobook will be invited as our special guests to the True Beauty 's "Angels & Butterflies" Ball at the O Mansion (www.omansion.com) ***
~ the book is dedicated in memoriam to my sister ~
Richard Chu The Ripplestone Project
Interview of me on the photobook project by MurmurDC.com
“What you should really be asking is Who I Am,” she says. “Not what I do. Me? I’m a hunter/gatherer!”
This is the difference a generation makes: the forward slash. Our mothers faced agonizing choices, often of education versus family. We face agonizing hyphenates, certain that in our fiercely independent age a woman can be both hunter and gatherer, archer and hearthstone, yin to her own yang. Or, as another one of these women phrases it, that she can “condense all the rules her mother taught her about femininity and those her father taught her about the corporate world into one very capable brain.”
We’re used to success, however over-caffeinated its form. We make our to-do lists. We schedule our friendships. We refuse to give up the job we love for the job that pays the rent, and so we work two jobs. We walk an executive high wire backwards and in high heels, and when we make dinner at 10 P.M. we still insist on using the whole grain rice. We grow attached to the control in our lives. We’ve earned it.
Cancer is terrifying because it could not care less about your to-do list. Cancer strikes the young mother and the beloved grandfather, the graduate and the dropout, the smoker and the saint. Cancer unstrings the archer’s bow, and cracks the hearthstone.
It’s easy to focus on the beautiful faces of these women, but my job is to focus on their words. I’m struck by the fact that when speaking to those fighting disease, they do not choose language of aggression. They don’t romanticize the idea of cancer as prey; they don’t swear to kick its ass. Instead they use the language of community, the invocation of “a silent army who bears defenses and support.” “You are light and spirit and strength,” one says, “and a product of those you love and are loved by.”
I can’t help but wonder if we are projecting the lesson that would be hardest for the women of our age to learn: the reality that our toughest battle would not be against a metastasis of abnormal cells, but rather against letting someone else’s hands fire the arrow and chaff the wheat, even for a day. What I have learned from illness is that sometimes the most powerful gesture is accepting and admitting your own vulnerability.
This book is a celebration of vulnerable and incandescent spirits. It’s impossible not to love these women. They have formed a quick-fire family, familiar to anyone who has lived in a city. Vietnamese and Mexican, Muslim and agnostic, lawyer and artist, they are united by a common openness and curiosity—a search. Their pure and uncalculated energy floods the creek bed and fills a cathedral. This is what they do, today. This is who they are, today. All the questions in the world could not elicit a truer beauty.
