Fat Friday! The Adipositivity Project

Substantia Jones, the photographer and brains behind this project, wrote this mission statement explaining her goals:

MISSION:
The Adipositivity Project aims to promote size acceptance, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that’s normally unseen.

The hope is to widen definitions of physical beauty. Literally.

The photographs here are close details of the fat female form, without the inclusion of faces. One reason for this is to coax observers into imagining they’re looking at the fat women in their own lives, ideally then accepting them as having aesthetic appeal which, for better or worse, often translates into more complete forms of acceptance.

The women you see in these images are educators, executives, mothers, musicians, professionals, performers, artists, activists, clerks, and writers. They are perhaps even the women you’ve clucked at on the subway, rolled your eyes at in the market, or joked about with your friends.
This is what they look like with their clothes off.

Some are showing you their bodies proudly. Others timidly. And some quite reluctantly. But they all share a determination in altering commonly accepted notions of a narrow and specific beauty ideal.

I love this project! Like the woman in the video expresses, where are we ever exposed to images of fat women celebrating them? We are constantly bombarded with derogatory or denigrating messages towards images of varying sizes; god forbid a woman wear anything above a size 4-6. Oh wait, the average size a woman wears is a 12-14. Even the word fat is never used as simply an adjective, the tone is always negative.  The beautiful images in this project have varying tones and no matter what the tone may be, whether it's joyous or pensive, they are all featuring the beauty of the woman, not in spite of being fat, but a moment of her beauty and her fat.

What do you think about this project?  Do you have any other photographer or artist who is doing similar work? Comment below or email me shapedbymylife@gmail.com