Kwon So Yeon and Choi Min Ho for Vogue Girl Korea 2010
Old, but I only just saw this. You can see the rest of the photos here.
I have very mixed feelings about this.
Half of the photos show Kwon either eating or having eaten a loooooot of food. Look at all those empty cupcake wrappers in the above photo. The implication is that she ate them, because just a few photos ago, there she is with a ridiculous amount of cupcakes. I mean, the smallest thing she’s eating in any of the photos is a whole cake. This reminds me of the music video for The Piggy Dolls, pre-weight loss, where the women are shown going to town on pizza (one is double-fisting it), a gigantic bag of rolls, and a gallon of milk.
On the one hand, showing a larger woman eating these things without any shame is a big “fuck you” to society. When you’re overweight, anything you eat can be up for judgment and discussion. Choose a salad? You’re dieting. Choose a cake? No wonder you’re fat. The photographer and Kwon do go there, and it immediately stops any kind of dietary criticism that netizens might throw out. These photos read, to me, as, “Oh, look at that. I just ate about 15 Costco pizzas. So what?” “Yeah. I am eating a whole damn cake. Do you have a problem with that?” “I’m just going to hang out in my bed and shove food into my face. Half-naked man, please pass me some of those cookies. If the rest of you don’t like it, too damn bad.” In the photos — because I have no idea what she eats in real life — she owns it, and if you own something, no one can ever sling it back in your face.
Then there’s the other half of the photos, which don’t feature food at all. Instead, it’s Kwon and her dog. Kwon drinking. Kwon laughing and dancing with an attractive man. There’s nothing there that yells “plus-size model.” There’s nothing there that codes her as Different. There’s nothing in these photos that sets her apart from a straight-size model. She could easily be replaced with any of these other women, and nothing would seem out of place.
This is where my problem is. Maybe this makes me bad at fat acceptance, but… On the one hand, I do love the defiance in the food photos — but on the other, I think I prefer the photos where her weight isn’t visually referenced and she can just be “normal.” Whenever magazines photograph plus-sized models, they always make a BFD about it or they become super special issues. “Look how progressive we are. There are plus-sized models. LOOK! We’re accepting! Look how different they are! And we included them anyway!”
But why does it always have to be pointed out? We have eyes. We can clearly see that she has a different body shape than the majority of female models — do we have to treat her differently because of it? Do we have to take special photos with food to shut down any criticisms? Why can’t we just photograph her like any other normal human being, laughing and dancing and playing with her dog?
