These are girls and women who want to reshape themselves for some perceived ideal. Instead of having several pounds of silicone stuffed into their breasts, losing sensitivity of those organs and risking poisoning, anorexics want to starve themselves to death in search of the thinnest body possible.

It's all ego. Ego at its most pathetic and soul-destroying. I can't imagine an anorexic being kind to children or animals, or helping at a homeless shelter, any more than women with synthetic breasts are willing to talk charmingly to nerds and lonely guys who aren't rich. They don't deserve pity or sympathy. About the only thing a sensible human being can do is shake one's head and walk away quickly.

Looking at those pictures, well, I just can't get Auschwitz out of my head. Very very disturbing.

Tom, there's more to it than ego. A lot of psychologists see it as girls literally shaping their bodies as the culture tells them to: take up as little space as possible, be frail, be unthreatening. (See Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher, PhD; and Appetites: Why Women Want by Carolyn Knapp, among many others.)

But Tracy, I had the same reaction as those girls. As I was reading, I remembered all the girls who used The Best Little Girl in the World as a how-to book, who read recovering anorexics' stories and saw them as a challenge to be even thinner than the writers, and who decided that it was better to be thinner than supermodels.

Unfortunately, anything that tries to show these girls the damage they are inflicting on their bodies seems to have the opposite effect.

I am struck at how rag-doll these women are. No faces, just Biafra like limbs. They look like a dead jumble of plastic.

A day or so a go, Playboy's Hef newest "girlfriend" was interviewed. Not sure if she has the requisite boob job or not (sooner or later since they are free perks of the job), but her face looked like a doll - a barbie - very plastic looking. Not real at all. Like the bodies on these starved women.

As someone said, these are opposite sides of the same coin. For a lot of these women, their self image is tied up in how closely they conform to some outside ideal.

Wonder what the differences in psyche are between the women who want to look as frail as possible, and those who want to look as close to a sex toy?

Wierd wierd. But I guess the extreme body builders (mostly male) are in the same strata?

The photographer clearly chose to cover the models' faces, whether to protect their identity and privacy, or for aesthetics. And equally clearly, they are wearing wigs. That beautiful blonde hair with all that shine and bounce is so at odds with the painful bodies, and to me, makes a clear statement "You can't have it both win" with beauty. Even if you attain your pro-ana "ideal" weight, you lose out on some other facet of the Beauty Grail. (I'm mixing metaphors badly, but you get the point).

The photos make me wince.

What else can I say? Whatever these women were trying to achieve, and regardless of whether or not it was imposed from the outside, this is clearly overkill writ large. At least fakirs had religious reasons...

my wife did it for another reason: to allow her to have some control in her young life. As a child experiencing the turmoil of her parent's divorce, food was the only thing she thought she could control. We all cope with such traumas in different ways. Unfortunately, hers was destructive.

She has successfully managed her anorexia for several years.

"I can't imagine an anorexic being kind to children or animals, or helping at a homeless shelter, any more than women with synthetic breasts are willing to talk charmingly to nerds and lonely guys who aren't rich. "

Tomreedtoon, my wife is a special ed teacher. She gives money to animal shelters, friends and strangers who are poor, and is helping raise her two (non-biological) nephews. You really should think twice before spewing such ignorant generalities about people.

Some readers seem to think that these images are real, so I've updated the post to clarify that these are healthy models who were Photoshopped to look severely emaciated.

now available to accept your projections

I don't see the point - this is just digital manipulation. If I take a bunch of football players, in their typical poses, and manipulate them to be ridiculously thin, fat, whatever - does that prove a point about football players, or the roles they're put into? Nope. Just proves that I can Photoshop.

To make a point about ana - use someone with it - complete with the damaged hair and skin and desperation. But you won't change their minds - it's a sickness, and they don't see reality.

"Art" has gotten so, well...thin.

Pro-ana sites and celebrity anorexics are as easy-access as everything is to our unprotected children. Lonely damaged girls are acting out the culture's rejection of itself until their brains are reshaped to require the starvation.

Anorexia is fatal more often than bodybuilding, which involves extreme nutrition. They're the same cultural illness though.

I don't find this photographer's work revelatory, but I'm glad for any attention to the culture's sickness.

These girls are mentally ill, not egotistical.

This is not aimed at them. It is aimed at those of us who consume fashion industry products. We allow these images to be glorified by the industry. We let these people tell us these images are beautiful, that clothes should be displayed to look beautiful on human clothes hangers rather than average sized women. We allow other people to claim these images are art.

The photographer is graphically showing us how sick this is. We BUY the damn ugly clothes. If we don't buy Vogue, InStyle, etc these images would not be here.

Tom has it wrong. The ego is in the high fashion industry, increasingly rejected (and les and less profitable) by ordinary people.

We women, though, should take some fault. Don't buy the damn magazines. Save money and pay off debt instead. DOn't buy the "model look". Save money and stop shopping.

Women need to step up and tell the fashion industry "stop". I know that I will be bashed for that. I've made this argument before- fashion victims have come after me before. But they need to look at those photos. Walking hangers are easy to design for, but the clothes do not look that way on real people. WHen women refuse to buy the mags, the models will become normal sized.