Be - Loved by Victoria J. Ridgway

Be - Loved investigates photography as an expression of Fat sexual desire, frustration and validation. In American culture, which is driven by patriarchal ideals, the large obese body is stereotyped as unworthy, shameful, and represents a person’s moral corruption. This bias against Fat bodies creates problems in accessibility to basic needs such as health care, clothing, and even comfortable seating in public. The Fat body becomes both invisible and hyper-visible to be criticized, referred to as a joke and compared to failure. This dehumanizing of Fat people solidifies the idea that Fat bodies are never the ideal and therefore should not be taken care of or revered in America’s strive for body perfection. This series examines the repressed pleasures and sexual experiences of an obese woman to interrupt the current ideals of physical attraction, body form and who’s right it is to have pleasure.

These images employ tropes from the family archive to discuss femininity and to disrupt the timeline of Fat existence that American media portrays. There is a fascination and widespread panic of a body epidemic that is said to only have begun in the last 30 years. This is a false claim. The Venus of Willendorf would be one of the oldest examples of a Fat person in history and proves that Fat bodies’ existence is timeless. Self-portraiture, performance and sculpture converge in the work to create a space of empathy and acceptance of my personal experience within a larger context of body and identity issues. The use of scale in the work and the aging, distressing and folding the photographic surface implicates the vulnerability of photographs and becomes a stand-in for both the body in the photographs and the body of the viewer. To touch and look at this work rewires our brains to see the beauty and humanity in Fat bodies and allows a reclaiming of identity and power for any body that has felt unlovable due to body image.

Victoria J. Ridgway lives and works in Greencastle, Indiana.
To view more of Victoria’s work, please visit her website.