Pregnant Pictures

When actress Demi Moore unabashedly posed for the cover of Vanity Fair in her birthday suit, the effect was electrifying, groundbreaking, sexy -- not simply because she was nude, but because she was nine months pregnant.

The solitary image of the pregnant woman in art, photographs and magazines has traditionally been anything but sensual and glamorous.

Bellies covered in frocks, medical drawings, and childbirth photos bear little resemblance to how women see themselves as pregnant. In this dazzling collection of over 200 photos of pregnant women taken from art libraries, childbirth manuals, maternity ads, contemporary art, and personal albums, the authors explore the paradox between image and reality.

The photos illuminate how society creates feminine roles through the institution of pregnancy-and how women resist such roles. By turns humorous, celebratory, startling, and intimate, the photos reflect the many shades of pregnancy: a lesbian woman holding her rotund belly on the cover of a feminist magazine, a women in her second trimester working assiduously on an assembly line, a rounded mother-to-be nude next to a statue of Buddha, a woman looking mischievously at the camera in a photo captioned, Deb, four months after eating a watermelon seed.

Written with vigor and grace, Pregnant Pictures is an eye-opening, fascinating look at the most misrepresented of art objects: the bulging, beguiling belly.