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.”