Malerie Marder began Anatomy in 2008 after traveling to the Netherlands for an exhibition of her work, where she became aware of a diverse population of women supporting themselves and their families through legal prostitution. The series was concluded in 2013 and published that November by Twin Palms Publishers. It includes images of women of all ages and ethnicities, made over several transatlantic trips. Marder has described her camera as a passport into a gray, hidden world, and the work as a result of a liberal society where free will is a question mark.

Marder has said she thought of Aphrodite, working single mothers, odalisques, adulterers and enigmas. She also wrote of the thought of how the women got there as deeply troubling, and meditated on the separate realities behind and in front of her lens. Her remarks suggest a project concerned with the distance between looking at a life and living it. The camera creates access, but that access does not remove the differences between the photographer’s position and the circumstances of the women she meets.

Published by Twin Palms in November 2013, the hardcover contains 88 pages and 37 four-color plates. Its 13-by-18-inch format gives the photographs a substantial physical presence. Color, setting and the individual figure can be considered together, rather than treating a portrait as a face separated from its surroundings. The book brings these encounters into a form that can be revisited at the reader’s own pace.

Anatomy invites attention to the relationship between a visible body and a life that a photograph cannot fully explain. Marder’s questions about choice and circumstance remain part of that encounter. A reader can consider the images alongside her reflections without expecting either to settle the other. The work’s interest lies partly in this unresolved distance: the person is present in the picture, while the conditions and experiences of her life extend beyond it.