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📸 Picturing obesity, liminal spaces, AI comes for OnlyFans, Putin body doubles
Alison Zavos
October 21, 2023
ON FEATURE SHOOT
A Photographer’s Quest to Change the Way We Talk About Obesity
Shannon was fourteen years old when she met the photographer Abbie Trayler-Smith. The artist was by Shannon’s side as she got ready for her prom, and later, when she got her first job. On vacation in Costa Del Sol in Spain, the pair of them laughed “til their bellies hurt.” Now, their years-long collaboration has culminated in the book Kiss It!, which weaves together a vibrant tapestry of one young woman’s experiences attending school, forging friendships, falling in love, pursuing her dreams, and living with obesity.
In truth, it’s two young women—not just one—who shine through these pages. Throughout, along with portraits of Shannon, Trayler-Smith has included diary entries from her own adolescence. As a teen in the 1990s, she wrote about feeling depressed and hoping to lose “two stone by Christmas.” She kept “diet diaries” to log her food intake. In junior high, the boy she liked wrote, “I hope you lose weight, love Mark” in her yearbook.
Now forty-five, Trayler-Smith returned to those since-forgotten diaries, finding herself at long last liberated from the self-abuse, disordered eating, and shame she’d endured in her girlhood. She credits Shannon with helping her along that path. Through Shannon, the artist was granted the rare opportunity to see and understand those early years differently than she had when she was in the thick of it.
“We shared so much over the years,” the photographer reflects. “Talking and listening to her revealed my own history. I began to see it reflected back to me in a new light. I realized the understanding and care I was giving to Shannon I had never given to myself.” We asked her to tell us more about the book, which has been twelve years in the making.
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“The Seventh Bardo”
“Interstates. Not innately interesting. No one looks at an exit ramp and thinks, ’ Wow, that’s gorgeous!’ The word brings up images of endless concrete, featureless structures, and bland landscapes. But I find the interstate to be a fascinating liminal space, unique to contemporary America. The sealed environment of our cars, the high speed of travel, and the limited access to the interstate itself all serve to separate us from our fellow travelers, the landscape we traverse, and the responsibilities of our busy lives. I feel I step outside the confines of time and space and can let go of demands on my attention and just be with the thrill of speed and my forward momentum, with the illusion of freedom from responsibilities, or with an internal journey of contemplation and reflection.
“As an adult, I often turned to the interstate in times of uncertainty, seeking the kind of introspection that I could only find on a long drive through its empty landscapes. ‘Bardo’ is a Tibetan term meaning ‘an in-between space’ and usually refers to the state of existence between death and rebirth. I am proposing that driving on the interstate is a kind of bardo. It’s an in-between space, disconnected from the rest of the world, where we’ve left where we were but have hours before we reach where we’re going. A meditation on the modern journey, the landscapes comprising The Seventh Bardo re-envision the view outside the window as a no-man’s land beyond normal time and space. It’s the external projection of restless souls caught up in an internal world.” —Beth Lilly, photographer
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