Monthly Archives: April 2014

Fat Nudes As Old Masters

Laurie says:

I was sent a link to Fullerton-Batten’s photos of fat nudes. As someone who does portraits with the goal of capturing some essential sense of the model in their natural body language, I found both the work and the artist’s description of it thought provoking.

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Fat nude wearing pearls, looking at her reflection in a mirror.
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She says:
I have transposed the old masters’ inspirational works into a modern context. Larger-than-life models of both sexes unashamedly shed their clothes and posed for me in the nude. I placed them individually in a scene with appropriate props and asked them to pose in ways that would show off their shape naturally and enhance their beauty. I simulated soft candle- and moon-light to recreate that seen in the old-masters’ paintings.

My models accept that their bodies are as nature intended them to be. They show honesty, both to others and themselves in a world all too often dominated by manipulated beauty.

I appreciate the politics of her explanation of her work, but I do not find the people in the photographs unmanipulated or individual.
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Fat nude holding an apple..

Her photographs are highly manipulated images of beautiful fat people (as far as I can tell, mostly women) using historical imagery and simulated old-masters light.  Her choices of the masters’ imagery are taken from work that shows idealized themes, that include beauty, arcadian nature, and the abundantly fleshy body. In these works they were painting embodied ideas, but ideas none-the-less. (They are not portraits,  although obviously portraits were part of old masters’ work.)

She is indeed making fat positive photos, but the model is subsumed into the greater image. They are indeed beautiful, but as part of the larger photo, not as themselves.

Thanks to Alan Bostick for the link.

Sojourner Truth: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance

portrait of Soujourner Truth

Laurie says:

I was listening to a Nell Painter video that Ta-Nehisi Coates linked to, talking about, among other things, her book The History of White People. I just finished the book, and it’s fascinating.

She mentioned on the video that Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and suffragist, (whose biography she’s written) had used photography. Of course, that immediately registered with me and I had to find out more.

Sojourner Truth was perhaps the most famous African-American woman in 19th century America. For over forty years she traveled the country as a forceful and passionate advocate for the dispossessed, using her quick wit and fearless tongue to fight for human rights.

Nell Painter says:  No other woman who had gone through the ordeal of slavery managed to survive with sufficient strength, poise and self-confidence to become a public presence over the long term.

One of the ways Truth supported herself was by selling portraits.

… Many former slaves depicted themselves in these photos with whip-scarred backs and clad in the rags of slavery. But Sojourner Truth — who sold the cartes-de-visite to support herself — chose to represent herself as a respectable middle- class matron, sometimes wearing glasses, knitting, or holding a book. “I think we can see Truth becoming strong enough to refuse to define herself as a slave,” (Quotes are from a The Chronicle of Higher Education review of the book)

Looking at the contemporary photos of Truth on the web there is a clear self presentation. Syreeta, in a review of the movie Lincoln on Feministing discusses this brilliantly.

Sojourner Truth, according to the Willis/Krauthamer book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans And the End of Slavery, understood the power of photography, and actively distributed photographs of herself:

“Those pictures were meant to affirm her status as a sophisticated and respectable “free woman and as a woman in control of her image.” The public’s fascination with small and collectible card-mounted photographs, allowed her to advance her abolitionist cause to a huge audience and earn a living through their sale. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” proclaimed the famous slogan for these pictures.

Truth was not alone in her understanding of the power of photography. A host of other African-Americans, both eminent and ordinary, employed the medium as an instrument of political engagement and inspiration. “Envisioning Emancipation” argues that photography was not incidental but central to the war against slavery, racism and segregation in the antebellum period of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s.”

… Truth understood the power of images was just as powerful a weapon as any. Even the composition of the photograph of Truth (noted above) has a subliminal power, appropriating classic European portraiture in her seated posture, her resolute gaze, showing a black body as American. Human.

The truth-telling photography and empathy that photography conjures isn’t new but understanding it as a mode of cultural and social activism during the Civil War era is and certainly worthy of a look back.

Truth-telling photography and empathy are what my work always aspires to. I need to learn a lot more about this history.

(Photo from Syreeta’s post on Feministing)