Is Fatphobia Our Fault?

A while ago we had a client happily return for a new headshot because she lost quite a bit of weight and wanted to celebrate her new, more socially acceptable body with some portraits of it. In the middle of her photo shoot, she fainted and landed face-down on the ground. She hadn’t eaten anything all day and refused even the small snacks we offered to bring her blood sugar back up when she revived. She unnervingly laughed her fainting spell off as something that happens often while she’s dieting. I think about this day often.

I’m a commercial portrait photographer, and started my studio, Organic Headshots, nearly 20 years ago. After two decades of taking photos of people for a living, I’ve heard tens of thousands of people berate their appearances and broadcast their insecurities. They’ve scorched their eye bags, their wrinkles, their hair, their ears, their chin, and I’ve even had one woman lament to me that she walked around with the face of a “goddamned puffer fish.”?

Yet the most common tongue-lashing I hear anyone give themselves as soon as they see my camera lens coming towards them is how irredeemably fat they are.?

My clients’ self-consciousness about their weight while being photographed shows itself in different forms. Most people turn to humor and self-deprecatingly quip something like “Ugh I have more rolls than bread week on the Great British Baking Show.” I see some people’s nervous systems choose “freeze” in the fight or flight response and watch them quietly stare at their photos with shame on their faces. Others lash out at the photographer and angrily insist we’re the ones making them look fatter than they are and demand a refund. Others cry.

A few months ago, I was at lunch in a Greek restaurant with some friends and one of them recommended everyone read Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, because it made her completely rethink dieting. She proudly claimed it was the reason she wasn’t ordering a salad that day and was instead getting the gyros she really wanted. I’ve watched this woman, who I always considered part of the skinny club with me, spend years broadcasting her weight-related insecurities and stressing about what she ate and how much she exercised, so I was definitely intrigued.

The book is a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for at least one good reason: it got this privileged, skinny white woman (who is paid to make other people also look skinny) to rethink dieting, which Manne claims is “morally bankrupt.” The failure of our medical community to treat fat people is reflected in the disturbing numbers of overweight bodies in morgues with causes of death from undetected preventable diseases that could have easily been diagnosed while they were alive if their doctors took them seriously and didn’t just tell them to go on a diet.

A particular statement Manne makes, which is simple, but somehow radical, floored me: “Insecurities are not a personal indictment, they are an indictment of the world.”

The lens through which I read the book was now different from my friend’s. I read it not as a victim of fatphobia looking for strength and validation, but as a member of the society which perpetuates fatphobia.?

If you’re fat, I’m your enemy. I’m the literal representation of our society’s glaring, ogling, scrutiny of fat bodies: I’m a skinny little photographer pointing a lens at you and barking poses to do the best I can to shrink you down so you look skinny like me. I’m here to perpetuate society’s bias against fat people, which says that if your body is large, it’s immediately assumed that you’re not just ugly, you’re also lazy, unintelligent, and somehow morally inferior. You’re less likely to get a good job and will be paid less than your skinnier colleagues. This is backed by research, and confirmed by my clients.

It breaks my heart to live in a society where my fat friends, family, neighbors, and clients are met with such deep-seated judgment that I have also been trained to transmit to them through my profession. I’ve started thinking more thoroughly about my role as a leader in an industry whose success is based on how well I can shrink people and make them look skinny to the world. After finishing the book, I envisioned completely renovating my photo studio into some sort of a mythic ancient bathhouse where bodies of all shapes and sizes can move freely and comfortably without judgment. Where bodies can simply exist as they are and be celebrated through photography by taking up every inch of the frame they possibly can.

There’s a problem, though. I’ve only survived 20 years as a full-time photographer because I’m able to make people look thinner in photos. If everyone walked away from their photo sessions with photos of them looking fat and feeling less confident than when we started, I would have been out of a job years ago. So I have to continue to make people look and feel confident and capable, which our society unfortunately still reads as “thin.”?

But I also recognize that I’m making the problem worse. Continuing to shrink people within the camera’s frame and adding more photos of thin people into our society’s collective family photo album is perpetuating the unrealistic expectations we set for each other and ourselves.?

Until our culture can take the 180-degree turn the moral philosopher Kate Manne calls for, I plan to start with small shifts. I’m going to balance my portrait photography with poses that don’t aim to shrink us all in the photo’s frame, because this visual shrinking also very literally perpetuates the shrinking of people to lower status within our society. And I’m going to shift the rhetoric used in my studio toward acceptance and confidence. So much in photography is based on “correction:” on “fixing” a photo with a zit, a wrinkle, a double chin, a large body. But there’s nothing to fix because there’s nothing that’s broken except our unrealistic expectations for each other.

While I do the work to heal my clients’ relationships with their image it’s also important to understand that the self-deprecating humor, anger, and sadness they express in my studio isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom of a larger problem, much like a sneeze is a symptom of a viral infection. To cure the negative feelings fat people have about their photos we need to eliminate the deeper cultural infection and work together to take down what Emily and Amelia Nagoski call the “Bikini-Industrial Complex:” the multi-billion dollar conglomerate of industries working against fat people to force them to diet and shrink themselves smaller.?

I now see the horrific feedback loop our society is stuck in: the medical community prescribes weight loss to cure fat people of every ailment they come in for (oftentimes missing a diagnosis of cancer, autoimmune diseases, and other actual life-threatening and treatable conditions); manufacturers build airplane seats, beds, chairs, doorways, clothes, and cars for small bodies so that anyone larger than 5’4” and 120lbs looks ridiculous; hiring managers choose skinnier candidates over fatter ones because they’re considered smarter and healthier; to survive, fat people feel pressured to shrink themselves into smaller sizes until they become unhealthier than before and end up back in their doctor’s office (or face-down on the floor of our photo studio).

I know I can’t break this cycle on my own. But I vow to do what I can to at least slow it down a bit. And I ask that we all do what we can to learn, teach acceptance, and reject fatphobia because it would break my heart to watch another client faint during their photo session.