A Model Mom

Photographer Leigh Ledare doesn't simply picture his mother naked. He also takes naked pictures of her.

Ansel Adams liked nature. Terry Richardson prefers the informality of the point-and-shoot. Leigh Ledare, well, he digs his mom. The photographer recently released a book of images, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, which features his mother, a 59-year-old ballerina-turned stripper, in various stages of undress. Some of the pictures include lingerie and boyfriends; many feature a come-hither gaze that wouldn’t be so jarring if the photographer weren’t her son. Ledare, 32, says the project began about eight years ago, when he paid his mother a visit in Seattle. “Basically,” he says, “I arrived home one Christmas, and I hadn’t seen her in a year, and she came to the door completely naked.”

Ledare, who left home at 15, and was formerly a professional skateboarder and assistant to photographer-director Larry Clark of KIDS fame, says the camera provides needed distance between him and his mother and, conversely, serves as a catalyst “to sort of push the relationship.” Pretend You’re Actually Alive, also the name of his recent show at New York’s Andrew Roth Gallery, reflects the tension inherent in their relationship, tracing his mother’s fall and Ledare’s rise. “It was my mother coming into a period of decline and attempting to resist that through projecting her sexuality and tying herself to younger boyfriends,” says Ledare. “And it’s a coming of age, artistically, for me.” Disturbing as his photographs may be, Ledare elevates the pictures from distasteful shock tactics into works of art through his depiction of a sad, aging woman desperately clinging to her last vestiges of youth. His images are now hanging at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and in September, he has a show at the Rivington Arms Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. One question remains: Has Ledare’s mother, with her Oedipal inclinations, ever propositioned him? “It’s nothing that direct,” he says.