Reading List: Photography (Fatography?) as Cure for Happiness
Yesterday, Salon published an interview with Carol Lay, author of the so-called “diet-book graphic memoir” The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude. Self-consciously clever wordplay aside, it is evidently less an illustrated personal story and more like a weight loss book with drawings. But I’m less interested in talking about the book, which I haven’t read, than I am in talking about this snippet from Lay’s interview:
When did you decide you needed to change your eating habits?
I saw a photograph of myself, looking apparently happy. But I saw that, “Wow, I’m overweight, and I’m tired of doing this to myself.” I make the suggestion, “Get yourself photographed.” Cameras are much better tools than mirrors. I’ve got my mirror trained to show me exactly what I want. The camera is out of my control.
As is my way, I’m going to preface my response to this with a personal anecdote.
When I was about fourteen, I went on Jenny Craig for the first time, after Weight Watchers and nutritionist-mandated menus had failed me in my primary childhood dream of being not-fat. This was in 1991. These days, I imagine commercial diet centers are all digital, but at the time we only had old-fashioned film, specifically polaroids, for instantly-ready pictures. My Jenny Craig “counselor” took a photograph of me on my first paid visit to their center, with a new Polaroid camera and an eye-blasting flash. In this picture, I am standing slightly off center, my back to the institutional grey wall behind me, like a suspect in a line-up. On my upper half I am wearing a long-sleeved loose-fitting shirt screenprinted with random French words, and festooned with sequined flourishes, made by a clothing company I particularly fancied at the time called Ultra Pink. On my lower half I am clad in purple knit stirrup pants. My hair is shoulder-length and its rarely-seen natural blonde shade. My face is attempting a halfhearted smile but wasn’t quite there when the shutter snapped. I am wearing a size 14, and I weigh 167 pounds exactly, which is shortly to be recorded as the beginning point on my weight-loss line chart.
This polaroid was to be my “before” picture. The counselor took it with an impressive measure of enthusiasm, with an absolute wide-eyed assurance that someday soon I would look at this picture and shake my head and say “I cannot believe I ever looked like that!” because I would look so very, very different. This polaroid was paper-clipped to my file at Jenny Craig, and every time I went in, for my weekly weigh-in and “counseling” session, I would see it there. Clipped to my file. Like a piece of my soul.
Like Jenny Craig had stolen a piece of my soul.
It bothered me. It bothered me quite a lot but I could not, at that time and that age, articulate why. I hated that they had that picture of me. As time went by and the once readily-dropping line on my weight loss graph stopped dropping and extended itself out straight and flat like an endless plain, I realized that no, Jenny Craig would not save me from my fat any better than anything else I’d tried would. And that picture made me angrier and angrier. Every time I saw it I felt vulnerable, literally exposed. I wanted it back. I fantasized about breaking in to their strip-mall storefront late at night, just to pull my own file and take that fucking picture back.
Later, I would realize this was me fighting. Or trying to fight, rather, though the real fighting would not begin for another five years or so.
In the lives and minds of most people in the US, I would argue that there is an almost inextricable link between any photograph of a fat body - no matter the context - and that archetypal “before” picture. Lay’s story of having her mind changed by a photograph of herself is hardly unique; we’ve all heard it before, from friends and strangers alike, of people who were sailing merrily through life, totally unaware of how unhappy they’re supposed to be because of how they look. Then, suddenly, one day they see an unflattering photograph of their body and: gasp, THAT is how I really look! I have to DO something!
Despite Lay’s assertion to the contrary (”The camera is out of my control”), photographs still have to answer to the eye of the beholder. Pictures that I find unflattering others do not, and vice versa. This is how it goes. Because so many of the images we see on a daily basis are positively saturated by perfect-seeming faces and bodies (both photoshopped and otherwise), the expectation is that everyone can and should look that way in photographs. This is hardly an argument I’ve just invented but one that’s been polished to a brilliant shine over decades of media studies and feminism. We come to expect that the kind of photography we see in media is normal - when we fail to look similarly unblemished in photographs, we are somehow individually responsible.
But what really gets me about the above quote is the dismissal of happiness. I looked apparently happy in that photograph, but I was wrong. I looked apparently happy, but upon further reflection, my breasts are slightly uneven, my skin is too dark, my knees are ugly, my hair is windblown. I looked apparently happy but I was wrong to feel that way, because look at me. How could I be happy, looking like that? What kind of idiot am I? I, in my blind willful ignorance, having the unmitigated bravado to LOOK HAPPY when I also look so IMPERFECT? When I also look so FAT? How pathetic. I didn’t even know.
In my mind, I can draw a clear line between my inclination toward self-portraits and the Jenny Craig polaroid from all those years ago. Even the more remedial images that I take, ostensibly just to record the day’s outfit, are all actually stunningly persistent reenactments of that Jenny Craig polaroid - standing full length, back to the wall, remembering everything I was wearing, again and again and again. My Jenny Craig portrait was such a sad picture, such a painfully, pitifully sad moment captured and clipped to my file as a constant weekly reminder of why I was there. The picture said, “I don’t know what else to do.” The picture said, “I am taking the action I’m supposed to take, the action the whole damn world has directed me towards.” That choice was not in my heart. I always had other options; I could stop being afraid, hating myself, punishing my body. But I didn’t know these options existed. I didn’t even know.
Now I look at these literal hundreds of new “before” portraits, and realize that somewhere along the way I proved that I could see myself in photographs and like the way I look, and feel happy with my body, and possibly most important, recognize myself in pictures without judgment, with only pleasure and love.
Carol Lay recommends that fat people get themselves photographed, as a reality check. I recommend it too. However, the reality check I prescribe is not the lightning-strike revelation that you look terrible, how can you be happy, why are you doing this to yourself - it’s that you look like you and you always will, and that learning to love and accept yourself as an entire person, at any size, at any age, in any health, in any photograph, no matter how unflattering, is the much surer course to true happiness.
I’m about to forward this to all my beloved fatties who don’t allow others to take pictures of them.
This is so great. Thank you Lesley, for posting this.
And, I must say, when I started taking photos of myself, so I could post some ootd posts on Fats, I actually started feeling better, rather than worse. And, I’m glad. And, I feel sorry for people like Carol Lay, who don’t have the same reaction I did. That makes me sad.
-Tisha
“In the lives and minds of most people in the US, I would argue that there is an almost inextricable link between any photograph of a fat body - no matter the context - and that archetypal “before” picture.”
Absolutely. We’ve been conditioned to read those photographs in precisely that way. Meanwhile, we haven’t really been trained to read those photographs of ourselves as “before Photoshop” (which they are, in the sense that, as you note, most professional photos of models and actresses and celebrities have been photoshopped to erase most of the “signs of aging” (not to mention living).
I definitely think it’s important for us to take photos of ourselves that we like–that make us feel good–and that we can look at and see, “This me, happy.” And it might even be necessary for us to label those photos–and to give ourselves that way.
This is cognitive therapy, I guess, but we need it.
Also, I want to say that I love your posts. They’re always damned smart.
I saw this article, too, and wondered why Salon was hyping some here-we-go-again, I-did-it-so-can-you diet book (albeit by someone who can draw, and draws a regular strip for them) and not even questioning the idea that all anyone needs to get and stay thin is to see a picture of how hideous her body is and to not stuff her face. Thanks for a most excellent takedown.
I want so many, many people to read this post. Thanks for your eloquence, as usual. You are S-M-R-T.
I know this is going to sound mega-hokey, but I actually had tears well in my eyes while I read this. Thank you, thank you, for writing this and writing it today, a day on which I was photographed and nearly panicked when I showed up with a large double chin, on a day when I felt like I was too fat to be posing in a fun way in the first place. All my friends can look at photos of us and smile fondly at the memory, but I’m chained to this belief that photographs are proof that I could never deserve those fond memories.
I scrapbook, but I’m hardly ever on the page. You’ve just inspired me to do an album all about ME. And I’m not going to worry if I have a double chin or if my post-cesarean tummy seems to hang. Thanks, Lesley.
I had to post because of something I realized *just* today, only a few hours before seeing your entry. I’m very new to FA - had no idea it was out there or that there was anyone to affirm my own intuitions that my fat body’s not that bad-looking! In fact, I rather like how I look, most days, though I still struggle with unflattering photographs.
Just this afternoon, I was dumping my camera, and in addition to the picture I wanted, there were some pictures from Christmas. My mom just moved to Salem, OR, and one afternoon of out vacation together, my mother, my sister and I went down to the (wonderful) riverfront carousel there. It was so beautiful. My sister was too embarrassed to ride it in public (we are all grown-ups by now), but my mom and I were determined to ride. It was the most wonderful time - so innocent, and the horses were even prettier close up, and I had forgotten just how exhilarating it can feel, just going up and down. Since my sister wouldn’t ride, I pressed my camera into her hands and made her take pictures.
Maybe I should have guessed that these wouldn’t be the most flattering pictures ever - taken from below, and all! But afterwards we got off the ride, and I gave the pictures a cursory look, cringed, and resolved to delete them all later. This afternoon I dumped my camera. And cringed again, to be honest. (I especially hate my double chin in pictures). But I made myself look really closely at them. And I realized I was SO HAPPY. In every single picture. Having such a marvelous time. And the pleasure I felt at seeing my own happiness gave me a glimpse into something I’d never been able to see before: what my friends must see in a picture when they say it looks pretty, and I say it’s hideous. And I kid you not: seeing the happiness actually changed my opinion about whether the pictures were photogenic or not. (Well, one of them still definitely isn’t, but that’s 1 in 6, not bad!) Suddenly, the pictures actually made me feel beautiful - double chin and all, no matter how prominently it asserted itself.
Now I doubt that this will work with candid pictures that catch me making an awkward frowny face - or with fake grimacey smiles. But I’m proud to know that photographs can’t always steal my happiness and my good memories anymore.
I read that article in Salon, and I thought that it was SO STUPID! For starters, I am just not buying the “oh, just admit it you lazy fattie, you just need to cut calories and exercise more!” angle.
As I ruminated upon the article at my leisure, a couple of things hit me:
1) the author is a woman over fifty (not a demographic known for success at weight loss!) so I imagine any loss she has experienced is hard-won indeed
2) At 5′ 9″ and (I think) @ 160 pounds, she wasn’t even remotely fat to start with, despite her CARTOOONS of her own fatness (I would like a “before” photo, cause I don’t think she would even look fat in it)
3) She was perfectly happy with her size, UNTIL SHE MOVED TO LA
4) THEN, she felt like a giant bag of fat
5) LA is full of anorexic women with lots of plastic surgery, honestly, it’s not like a normal place at ALL for being female. A woman who normal weight would feel fat (Oh! She Did!)
6) the author lost a total of thirty pounds or something; not NOTHING, but not any 150 pounds or other remarkable loss. In fact, I would put that well inside of my normal weight fluctuations
7) she did it by becoming completely obsessed with food and calories counts, and IMHO, is living in an ED hell where a slice of birthday cake once a year is a temptation to be resisted
8) Now she feels good about herself, at 125 and 5′ 9″. Now, I was THIN, SKINNY, at 125 and 5′6″. Really really skinny. She must be a RAIL at 5′9″
9) this is not a story of a fat woman whho got with the program and lost weight. This is the story of a normal woman with a well-functioning endocrine system, who got obsessed with being as thn as a coltish teenager, and has been able to get there with calorie restriction/starvation/ED.
MEH. THis is just not a new story, nor one that needs to be told.
I managed to “miss” the “before” photo ritual myself. But I agree there’s something nice about smiling at a photo of one’s self…
In the last few years, my husband and I have been into photography (say no more), and it was a hard sell for me to let him do it. It takes a lot of posing and arranging to get really good pictures of most people; that’s why there are professionals. And I don’t like every picture he takes of me; a lot of them get trashed. But there are a fair number in every bunch that I really do like. One day, I looked through my favorites among them, and I was in tears. Because I saw someone I thought was beautiful, when I’d been told all my life that I wasn’t. Photography did give me a lot in that way. It also taught me that it takes a lot of effort, even before photoshopping, to be photogenic. And I’m sure that’s true even for models sometimes. We only see the best pictures, not the ones they delete from the camera.
45 lbs later, and now at my highest weight ever, I recently had some snapshots taken on a guitar camp weekend. My first reaction to those was horror, and I wasn’t going to post them anywhere in public. That shame is so hard to kill. I didn’t want people to see them, even though they saw me every day. But I was smiling and having a good time. And that was me. I felt like if I didn’t post those pictures, everything I’d ever said about accepting myself, and encouraging others to do so as well, would’ve been bullshit. And I couldn’t allow that. So I did. And the world didn’t end.
Facebook started me on true FA. I lost control of who got to take and publish photos of me. At the same time, I started looking at photos of normal people more often - normal people I saw in real life. I realised I NEVER looked at their photos and thought ‘ew. She looks so fat’, I only thought ’she looks happy/sad/tired/excited/beautiful’
So I got over myself :P