Among the photos of Lisa Faiman '03, her favorite depicts the stretch marks on her own mother's abdomen. Smiling attractively, she recounts the story of how, one time, a male friend walked into her room, and, not realizing what the stretch marks were or that Faiman had taken the picture, exclaimed with distaste, "That is so disgusting!"

Instantaneously, everyone in the room turned their heads to see how Faiman would react. "I was so amused at his reaction because after looking at that photo for so long, it is my favorite," she says. "It was fun, almost, to explain the natural process of a Japanese woman's body when she has a large, half-American baby."

The glossy black-and-white prints she has pulled out of her well-worn leather portfolio are spread across the dark wood of the kitchen table. These are the photos she took last year for her Visual and Environmental Studies 40a project, which she modestly entitled Woman. Woman, she explains, focused on the image and transformation of the female body.

"I photograph women a lot, the female form-I've always had this love-hate relationship with the female figure. A lot of it is because I think most women my age-" She hesitates for a moment before continuing. "I'm so self-conscious about my own body, and I have a lot of issues stemming from that. I think that my subjects in photography are a way of wrestling my own demons. Oh God, that sounds so pretentious," she adds, laughing.

The pictures are of bare women, stripped down to their undergarments and untainted by any real external distractions-their naked shoulders, backs, stomachs, legs and buttocks. The women are nude or close to nude, but they're not flesh on display; they exist purely and magnificently in themselves. Every blemish and detail is defined in its natural state, but they aren't imperfections or flaws. Rather, they are celebrations of the beauty of the unaffected womanly body, of mothers and friends and sisters. There is no pretense involved.

"Photography's fun because you take a picture and you get to develop it and see how different or how much better they turned out than you originally expected," she explains before showing me a favorite series of photos, taken at last fall's Latin Fire Dance. To capture the images of the well-defined bare calves, feet and dancing heels of the female flamenco and salsa dancers among the clothed pant-legs of bystanders, Faiman literally crouched on the floor of Adams Dining Hall with her camera.

In another series, exploring the way that the skin of her subjects can be transformed and the unnatural juxtaposition of patterns on a natural body, Faiman had her models lie down on the back of a carpet square and used baby oil to experiment with the external markings she could create on the bodies of young women. "I got the idea it would look almost reptilian if I could get it shiny enough to look like scales," she explains.

Many of Faiman's pictures are of her mother, but other subjects have included friends who have donated time and help. "I just think that it's easier to appreciate the female body when it's not my body," she says. "I can look at them as beautiful and not emaciated, 6 feet tall and blond."

While Faiman is inspired in part by her own personal encounters with bulimia and anorexia, this isn't self-revelation for its own sake: "The only reason that I mention that is because I think there are a lot of girls at this school who have eating problems and who are still in denial or are still ashamed to do anything about it... I don't think it is something to be ashamed of, and I don't mind admitting that I have problems with it."

"I have never liked my body," she acknowledges openly. "I think it's something that is so common, and I am not going to pretend that this is some humanitarian effort for young girls. It was for me, and for me to start looking at the female body, and looking at it as something that is beautiful even though it's not perfect."