Here's a Thing

Here we have a kickstarter for a book about teen obesity, focusing on (to some degree I cannot fully discern) a single subject named Shannon. The photographer, Abbie Trayler-Smith, started working with Shannon when the latter was 15 years old, and I think we may freely assume that at least some photos of underage Shannon appear in the book. In addition, it seems that quite a few sexualized photos of Shannon (presumably no longer underage, let us hope the records are in order) appear.

This book is getting a certain amount of support from what we might describe as "the usual suspects" on social media. This same group is rather fond of pointing out exploitative projects in which, say, underage girls in Africa are photographed for one reason of another. These photos are invariably "bad" because they're exploitative, not empathetic, and so on. There is a whole litany, repeated in chorus at appropriate intervals.

While I may quibble about the details of the litany, to do so is not my intention today. Let us stipulate that the litany is spot on in every detail, for the moment.

The point I want to make here is that every accusation leveled at the Bad Photos can also be leveled at Kiss It!

A common refrain we hear is that "these photos" would never be taken of white people. As Kiss It! illustrates (but see also, for example, Mary Ellen Mark's photos of Erin Blackwell, "Tiny") this isn't really true. You could argue that Kiss It! is built around, perhaps, an empathy with the subject that's not present in the colonial, bad, pictures. This is, I think, a difficult row to hoe, and frankly I think to make that argument would be to project onto the pictures things that are simply not visible, not present.

What is, I think, actually going on is much more nefarious.

When we see the pictures of Shannon, whatever else we see we tend to imagine a kind of agency. Shannon, we feel, is capable of meaningful consent in a way that a Black girl, especially a Black girl in Africa is not. You could substitute in a girl in Guatemala, or New Guinea, with the same effect.

We are, it turns out, much more willing to accept a narrative of "incapable of meaningful consent, and therefore probably exploited" when we see a picture of someone in the Global South, and we are much more willing to accept a narrative of "sufficiently sophisticated and aware of contemporary media culture to give valid, meaningful, consent" when we see a person apparently from the "global north" especially if they are white.

I don't mean to particularly point an accusing finger. I feel it too.

Indeed, there is an argument to be made that people from the global south, as a category, genuinely do have less agency. Poverty, for instance, might well have pushed someone into being photographed when they might otherwise have preferred not to be. People in the global south are indeed more likely to be impoverished, it's part of the definition. There is a necessarily probabilistic argument you can make here. But, it's an argument about likelihoods, not specific cases.

People like Shannon can also be poor, and people in Africa have cell phones and instagram accounts. You can't just make blanket statements. If the photographer says they worked closely, collaboratively, with their subjects and and otherwise checked all the boxes, it's not right to simply say "lol, liar" simply because the photos were made in Thailand. Photographers can absolutely parachute in to a place in the USA, take a bunch of shitty titty shots, and pretend that it's anthropology. Exploitation, as well as its opposite, can in fact take place anywhere.

I don't think that the subject's skin color is a particularly reliable indicator of the degree of exploitation in play, although it might loosely correlate.

I'm not super happy about the Kiss It! project. It strikes me as exploitative. It's hitting a fairly chic topic, in a fairly chic way. There's a depressing amount of the "let's photograph her naked, because that's empowering" trope. It strikes me as essentially too obvious to be taken very seriously. Trayler-Smith wants to "challenge what it means to be fat" which is either a meaningless artspeak noise, or, if it means anything at all she merely wants to remind us that obese people are people. Does this obvious fact bear repeating? I suppose?

I'm sure Abbie and Shannon are indeed friends, and that it's very lovely, but at the end of the day Abbie wants to take a bunch of photos of her friend and boost her own career with them. She wants to turn Shannon's life, specifically the hard parts of that life, and turn that into grist for a "Abbie is a Very Serious Photographer" narrative. Trayler-Smith wants not merely to say "fat people are people too" she wants to get a cookie for repeating this well-established and oft-repeated refrain. While it may bear repeating, I don't see why Trayler-Smith ought to earn a cookie for doing so.

Maybe the book will be great, I dunno. It doesn't look too great to me. It looks dated, shallow, and try-hard.