About the series: Body of Work is an on-going series of short moving image investigations of real individual’s experiences of what it is to live with, recover from, or not recover from, an eating disorder. Working from the intersection of ethnographic field practice and experimental nonfiction filmmaking, each project begins by conducting an oral history with my collaborator, transcribing our conversations for themes and analyze the narrative for possible moving images re-imaginings. Bringing this close reading back to my collaborator, we work together to organically craft a filmic response to that oral history, seeking to create an aesthetic space of experience that is at once deeply specific, as a portrait, and yet broadly resonant, as ethnography.

A body image is a concept of one's own physical appearance. A body image can also be a representation of a body. If a negative body image is a personal problem of perception, of failing to see the truth of one's own body, what are we to make of the mediated landscape of body images that populate both our minds and our screens? This film stretches out the tensions between the various images we create of ourselves, and how we feel about them. Made in collaboration with Sergio Flores. - Anna Swanson, 2016

This video will make three statements — two of them might be true, and one of them might not be. Made in collaboration with Jessica Pleyel. - Anna Swanson, 2016