Published in 2013, Fritz Liedtke’s *Skeleton in the Closet: Eating Disordered Lives* addresses anorexia and bulimia through intimate portraits of women and men living with—and attempting to move beyond—eating disorders. Its 102 pages place a subject often governed by secrecy into sustained public view, while resisting the reduction of its participants to symptoms or diagnoses.

The book combines photographs with personal accounts, establishing a dialogue between outward appearance and first-person experience. That structure is central to its ethical and artistic position: the camera records bodies, faces, and gestures, but the accompanying voices complicate what an image alone can disclose. Liedtke also writes from his own experience of anorexia, making the project both a fine-art monograph and a memoir rather than an observation conducted entirely from outside its subject.

The range of participants—including women and men of different ages and ethnicities—broadens the book’s challenge to familiar assumptions about who experiences eating disorders. Gina Ochsner’s introductory contribution adds a literary frame to this meeting of portraiture and testimony. The result is compassionate without treating recovery as simple, and direct without turning private struggle into spectacle.

For collectors of socially engaged photography, documentary portraiture, or books concerned with health and identity, the work merits attention for the way it joins authorship, lived experience, and collaborative testimony. Its significance lies less in making a comprehensive clinical statement than in preserving a focused photographic encounter with lives shaped by concealment, compulsion, and the effort to leave an eating disorder behind. As a book object, its square paperback format gives concentrated form to a project whose meaning depends on the relation between image and narrated experience.