>It's extremely cruel, Shel - you certainly have not shown it to anyone. If she were not so pathologically obese the shot with the sign in it and her clutching the bottle would have been fun.
>IF you took the shot without showing her face at all, for purposes of showing how ill we, as a nation, are making ourselves - perhaps. I think there is a presumption here that I find disturbing. The woman is fat, yes, but I feel a lot of people are reacting negatively to this picture because they react negatively to fat and fat people, not because the photograph is negative per se. Did Shel make her fat? Is what made her fat known? Did Coke make her fat? Did fast food make her fat? Does it really matter? Does one have the "right" to take photographs of things that others find unpleasant? Or of people who may be unattractive to them? The only thing I felt was a possible put down was the title. And that is easily changed. Once in Polynesian cultures, fat was a sign of beauty (because it was a sign of wealth). If she was naked and spread out on a tropical print eating a pineapple, would that be okay? Would it not be "cruel?" If it was a skinny nerd with tape-mended broken glasses who looked like a loser clutching a coke and not her, would that be okay? I honestly fail to see how taking pictures of what is, of what is actually "out there" can be any sort of inherent put down. Those things just *are.* Photography, like painting/drawing, in addition to what is really there, is so much a matter of what we, the viewer, bring to it. Sort of like a Rorschach test. Marnie aka Doe
