Open Letter to SF Chronicle (Shame Shame Shame)

The main image used for an article on the AMA decision to classify obesity as a disease. I was told that a photographer would come to my home to shoot me blogging about the decision. None of the images that SF Chronicle photographer took of me blogging were used for the article.

Vulnerability is not something I do well. I have put a lot of time and energy into creating my armor - the emotional encasing I create to arm me against a culture that attacks my body because I am a woman and I am fat and I am a person of color. So, when I saw the main image used in a recent article on the American Medical Association's decision to classify obesity as a disease I fought the feelings of betrayal and intense vulnerability that I felt.

The article's author asked if the Chronicle could come into my home and photograph me blogging about the AMA decision. When the photographer arrived he in fact did take multiple images of me blogging in my home and at a cafe near my apartment where I often blog. Not a single one of them made it into the article.

I wrote to the Chronicle voicing concern and asking for answers on their choice, but I wanted to share the letter I wrote to the photographer because I spent over an hour with him, sharing my thoughts, my history and my home:

Hi,

I'm writing because I wanted to voice a sense of the vulnerability that I shared with you and the Chronicle in letting you into my home to allegedly take photos of me blogging, and the feeling of betrayal and disappointment I feel now. I am unclear whether you were specifically told that you were actually going to take pictures of me doing mundane things in my bedroom in some of the most vulnerable positions imaginable.

I am so disappointed with the sense of gawking fatphobic voyeurism that came through in the main image for the article. Let me be clear - it is not my body that makes me feel disappointment; it is the clear intention of that image and the callous use of my body as a fetishistic object held up for scrutiny; it is the desire to showcase my body as part of a landscape in which I am constantly in struggle or tragically at odds with my body - neither of which are the case.

After having done work with the Chronicle previously and found my image (and my body) treated respectfully I thought that I could trust you. I have defended media outlets and affiliated photographers to friends, activists, and colleagues, but you have become part of a valuable lesson - one that will make stories like this increasingly more difficult to find any friendly collaboration on, as I do plan to write about my analysis of this experience and this image.

Virgie

This image of my body attempts to evoke the kind of sentiments that promote fat shame and fat discrimination and that help to perpetuate an emotional and political climate that makes decisions like the AMA's possible.

Let me be clear: my body is not an object of shame to me. This image does not elicit a sense of shame or disappointment in or toward me. My body - and images of this radical, outlaw body - cannot be used against me. It will not be used against me. These images have already become part of my archive, for my pleasure, for my wonder, for my enjoyment and interest and contemplation. I have reinterpreted them, disrupted their intention and their meaning. Every day I live the resistance against the public's desire to see me as an object upon which it can hang its anxiety, guilt, shame and fear. Every day I fight to make my body my own. 

Let me be clear: the intention of this image and the circumstances under which it was taken are hurtful to me, but this image, this body - they are mine.