Here are two photos of the same individual taken years apart. I think its pretty obvious what people will see has changed.
..
.
.
.
.
.
I’m talking, of course, about ditching the round wire-frame glasses for the black, thick framed glasses. What? Did you see something else? Well, I can’t anticipate how others might view this juxtaposition of images. I just wanted to make a point about how I like the glasses I wear now better than the ones I used to wear. I assumed I didn’t need to explain that.
Of course, I’d never assume that. There is a visual language to the juxtaposition of images of a person where their size is variable. This is culturally coded. Think about the most common places you see such juxtapositions? That’s right, in fat shaming diet advertisements. Its about our social visual language. If I really wanted to stress the difference in my glasses, I’d need to point that out. And frankly, I’d still need to anticipate people seeing an implicit bit of fat shaming in the juxtaposition because of how such image pairs are deployed in our culture. I could have told you about the glasses right from the start, and people will still see the variance in size.
It doesn’t even really need the pairing. Images of fat people are so intrinsically linked to fat shaming in our cultural landscape that many see nothing else when they see an image of a fat person. Its what entitles “reverse thinspo” blogs to appropriate our photos. They are responding to the social conditioning that shames all visual representations of fat people.
This expectation obviously does not oblige us to it. It should not limit how we express ourselves or how others reference fat individuals. But it is something we need to be aware of.
You know, if I didn’t know the context I would never have guessed that this is supposed to be a picture of someone who got fat. Seriously. Just as with the pictures used in the post that spawned this, the change is simply not that dramatic. As a fat person I’d accept either guy at their words if they told me they’re fat, but the pictures just don’t scream “this is a picture of a fat guy”.
And in the original post, there was a lot more different between the two than a pair of glasses and the amount of padding on the face. Given the actual context (racism and the picking apart of Trayvon Martin’s presentation in various photos)…
Yeah.
Disingenuous post is disingenuous.
