Photographs of women laughing, gazing dreamily into the distance, hugging friends or teammates, holding up soccer balls, or, in one photo, biting into a greasy piece of pizza are hanging in the Smith Union’s Lamarche Gallery through April.

In every photo, the models, all Bowdoin students, are naked. Yet the nudity seems to be beside the point. Instead the bright personalities of the women burst out at the viewer, almost overwhelming the fact of nakedness.

The photo exhibition, “Celebrating Women, Celebrating Bodies,” is a project by Laura Armstrong, student director of the Women’s Resource Center. She says she wanted to create a “space for a positive body experience“ and to counter the “self-critical internal and external dialogues” women often have around body image. Armstrong worked with Christopher Omachi ’12 and Valerie Wirtschafter ’12 to photograph the roughly 100 women who participated in the project.

Read Armstrong’s thoughts about the exhibition and what she hopes it achieves.