I’m not sure how much further they can push this PC stuff anyhow. We’ve already locked everybody’s tongues. Gosh forbid you say anything the slightest bit offensive.
Now even a glance at someone is too much? Especially when it’s not even certain that glance was even directed at the person? Seeing a fat person in public isn’t exactly a unique event in America. We’re one of the fattest nations on the planet. I don’t give most people a second glance. But I’ll be darned it I’ll stare up at the sky either. I can’t help where my eyes stop now and then.
What’s next? Mobile brain scanners to detect any non-PC thoughts?
as a side note the last photo on her site is taken in Gibson’s Donuts. If you look in the background the lady at the counter with her kids and the one in the back ground sitting are just as fat as the photographer. I doubt the little girl is thinking anything about the photographer’s weight and more about that tasty donut. I lived off Gibsons when we lived at the U of M and I was preggers with he twins. Yuuuummmmm Donuts.
If anyone is interested, it is worth a visit if in Memphis. Half price donuts after 11:00 pm.
Damned if I know, because I wasn’t there. I’m not arguing that this lady is the second coming of Andy Warhol and it’s entirely possible that most of her shots don’t actually show anybody consciously messing with her. But it’s pretty hard to dispute that some of them do, and the fact that she manages to throw some false positives in there with the real ones doesn’t really do a whole lot to convince me that she’s got nothing to complain about. The stories accompanying the pictures she’s taken explaining how she perceived “mockery” from the people caught in the shot seem plausible enough to me, although I guess you are free to believe that she is misinterpreting or misrepresenting the events depicted in one or in all of them.
Another thing that’s pretty hard to dispute is that women in particular get a whole lot of shit from a whole lot of people for the way they do or don’t look. This includes, but is in no way limited to, shitty remarks from strangers on the street. I mean, you’ve got posts here saying that the lady shouldn’t complain that on-duty police officers are making fun of her because her fucking posture isn’t up to snuff? Because her hair doesn’t look the greatest? Come on, guys. Can you not see what a tremendous load of horseshit that is?
The only picture in that grouping that remotely looks to me like she’s bring openly mocked is the cop photo, and still, there’s no context. Based on the rest of the pictures, it makes me look at that one very skeptically whether they were in on it.
I’m heavier than her. Have been for some 20 years. I think in all that time I’ve been teased about my weight maybe twice.
Honestly, the looks on people’s faces in the crowded areas, I would be very likely to be caught with a similar look on my face in her direction. But I’m fat too, so maybe I don’t count in her persecution complex. It would have nothing to do with what she looks like and everything to do with someone acting like a doofus tourist (either with a tripod or someone taking pics of her over and over), messing with the flow of people who are just trying to get somewhere. I might look at her wondering what the heck she’s doing, in the couple of pics she’s bent over in half doing something on the ground. And nobody gives a shit that she’s eating gelato, except to wonder where she got it.
I would need to see a lot more context and far more convincing pictures for me to believe all those people are directing their gazes at her, and for the reasons she thinks. It’s sad she feels so persecuted, and as someone of a larger size than hers for at least as long, I just don’t see it.
The cop one looks so staged. Maybe she was standing there all still like a statue and the cops were playing along. People mess with performance artists who play statues and the like all the time. They aren’t making fun of them, they are having fun because they think it is a performance. She staged the shot and got an appropriate non-threatening response.
Yeah, me too. I agree that fat-shaming and general mocking of people for their physical imperfections are prevalent in our society, and that’s a bad thing.
But in the vast majority of these pictures, it didn’t look like anyone was paying any attention to the artist at all. I don’t think they convey the message she is trying to put out there, so in that sense they are not very successful.
I don’t think any of this makes her an attention whore, any more than artists generally are.
This story, which you made up, isn’t very persuasive. Nor are people’s comments about how there’s no context. Here’s the context, in her own words:
Bolding is mine. She doesn’t claim that every person is making fun of her. She claims that people are reacting to her, looking at her, and then she reverses that gaze and looks at them. That’s it. It’s pretty apparent that some of these people are mocking her, but not so apparent with others. Her weight and past abuses were the spur for the project, but I’m not getting any sense of a persecution complex about this.
Where is the mocking? What are the cops mocking when they place a hat near her head? That is the only one that remotely looks like mocking and it is unclear what they are mocking. My scenario is more plausible than the one where she is trying to say they are deriding her for her weight. Show me the other pictures with mocking. Her message isn’t conveyed in any of her pictures. I am over weight and I feel insecure all the time, yet I still couldn’t bring myself to feel outrage or disgust from any of those pictures.
When you look at a photo the context is alway being decided for you. Pictures are always being deliberately selected. Haley’s decision making on which photos to include and exclude from the project and to display her images in the context of her choosing is simply what photographers do. Are her images “the truth?” No more than any other photograph ever taken. Are they out of context? Absolutely!
I’m a big photographer. I’m self conscious. I often explore issues I have with my weight in my work. I don’t have a lot of time to go deeper into this: but the a lot of the criticism of Hayley’s work (both by people in this thread and out on the internet) is not really fair. Photographs don’t represent truth. The represent the view of the photographer. If I have more time later on I’ll expand on this, and if I don’t, I won’t.
Her project and comments saying she’s happy with herself don’t gel with the above, IMO, especially when the reactions she’s getting from people are contrived and very likely unrelated to how she looks and much more likely with how she’s going about doing what she’s doing. Of course I’m just one person, but she seems quite put-upon to me (as someone who has not experienced and does not feel the same as she writes in the above quotes). It makes me wonder if she’s maybe kind of an annoying individual IRL and would be even if she was a hottie, eliciting similar reactions regardless.
So, there’s an idea. Turn the camera on yet a different subject, have her do the same things in crowded areas with a tripod and/or second person standing across from her and taking pictures of her. See whether there are the same kinds of reactions from people. My bet is on yep. I truly think she’s seeing things in these photos that just aren’t there.
But, but, but…according to her, her obesity is totally due to having hypothyriodism, not from eating “fattening food”. Ergo, there is no such thing as a “fattening food” for her, because her fatness has nothing to do with how many calories she eats.
Let me know if I’m completely missing what you’re saying, because I think I get it. My problem with her project is that she seems to be wanting people to see the same thing she’s seeing in those photos. She seems to be saying people are looking at her funny, and mocking her - as the title of the article says. Perhaps the problem is technique, but I just am not buying into what she wants me to see. An effective photo project has to get the viewer to buy into what the photographer is trying to portray, even if it’s just a little bit, and regardless of the context. The problem is that she seems to have failed to do so.
Yeah, I have no problem with her deliberately editing for interesting photos that help make the point or fit the vision of the project she is doing. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like she’s a documentary photographer bound by journalism ethics trying to capture an objective “truth” of some sort.
So, I’m cool with all that.
I think her idea is kind of interesting, but her execution leaves much to be desired. Like most other people in this thread, most of the photos, to me, don’t show what I think the artist thinks they’re showing. The one of her sitting in the stands with the guy behind her and the woman taking a photo? That just looks like a guy having his pic taken by his girlfriend. The gelato one by the pedestrian crossing kind of works. But that’s about the only one.
Even the cops one, I can’t quite tell what’s going on there. Why is the hat floating in mid-air? Did the cop fumble it or something? It doesn’t look like he’s deliberately holding it over her head, given the lack of a hand holding it. Looking through her website, for most of the photos, I can’t even tell who I’m supposed to think is judging her negatively. Like what’s up with the Chicago Bean photo? I can’t tell what anyone is looking at.
…yep: you are completely missing the point of what I said. And your response to me has nothing to do with anything I said either. Its like you quoted me just to give yourself a springboard to have another rant: surely you could have ranted without quoting me?
“As for what the images mean, viewers may interpret the images as they see fit. I’m just trying to start a conversation.”
Fascinating thread. Dont know if people know about the TAT or thematic apperception test, but I almost wonder if that was her goal.
“The rationale behind the technique is that people tend to interpret ambiguous situations in accordance with their own past experiences and current motivations, which may be conscious or unconscious.”
That’s just the thing - I’m not convinced that most of these people are looking at her (horrible cops excepted). Most of them seem to be starting off into space. I’m sure people could catch me in photos making horrible faces in the direction of random passersby, but that’s not because I’m silently mocking or judging them. 99% of the time, I don’t even see my fellow pedestrians.
I’m not trying to pick a fight and I’m not ranting. What I got from your post was that the photographer chooses the context of the picture for her audience, regardless of what the reality of the photograph may have been at the time. I was responding to that and saying she failed to present her project in a way for people to see what she’s seeing and experiencing. It seems that may be why she’s getting so much criticism, it’s just not there.
I’m perplexed at your response and apologize for missing your point.
I’m sorry she’s not as thin as she’d like to be. I’m sorry she apparently get effective treatment for her hypothyroidism. But what I see is someone so deeply concerned about her visage and others’ judgment of it – despite her protestations to the contrary – that she’s deluded into thinking everybody’s always thinking about her. She is not emotionally well.
