Presented in an extra large format clothbound hardcover book, Iselin by Massimo Leardini presents the results of a two year collaboration with the photographer’s longterm muse, the Norwegian model Iselin Vollen Steiro.

In an accompanying text, the feminist writer Madeleine Shultz questions how artists should approach photographing naked women in a post #MeToo era? Postulating that women’s bodies are not a problem in themselves. Rather, it is those who take women’s bodies from them and turn them into something artificial or into the property of others. That Leardini is a white, heterosexual man who gazes at naked female bodies through a camera lens, not with desire or to exalt us, but for precisely the opposite reasons – to take womens’ bodies out of a sexualised setting and give them an obvious place in the world – is not just unique but also important.

Here are no images of a naked women in the highly sexualised way that we very often see today. These are glimpses by one human being of another human being’s body as a composition in and with nature. Here is no mere idea of a model in a feigned setting, but the actuality of a person in nature, the most genuine and essential of settings. That the eyes doing the glimpsing belong to a man and that the body is that of a woman makes this project a significant contribution to the ongoing conversation about what the body is today.