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My offering for you this week: đź’śđź’śđź’ś Coming Soon: Body Liberation Quote Library đź’śđź’śđź’ś

 

For years, people have been asking me where I get all the quotes I include in my social media posts.

 

The answer is that my superpower is collecting and organizing information. Over time I've collected over 500 quotes on body liberation, fat acceptance, Health at Every Size®, intuitive eating and more.

 

I'm making all 500+ quotes available in a tidy little library to my Patreon 

patrons at the Body Liberationist level ($10/month support) and up starting today.

 

You can use these quotes any way you like by just copying and pasting from the library. (With credit to the person who said or wrote it, of course, and a tag or link back to them when possible.)

 

New to the Body Liberation with Lindley Patreon?  

 

The Patreon is your way to both support my work and get exclusive rewards.

 

You're also helping support a number of ongoing projects, including the weekly Body Liberation Guide, a newsletter jam-packed with resources on body acceptance and Health at Every Size.

 

Sign up at http://www.patreon.com/bodyliberation

 

Here's how to upgrade your membership tier if you're not already at the Body Liberationist level or higher:

 

1. Visit your active memberships page and click Edit in the Body Liberation with Lindley membership details.

 

2. Click the “Edit” button in the summary section of the payment page, then click the “Join” button for the tier you’d like to switch to.

 

3. Review your new tier and payment details and click the “Update” button to confirm.

 

That's it! Super easy.  

 

Once you're in a tier with access, hang tight and I'll send you a link to the library.

Hi friend,

 

As I celebrate five and a half years in business (woohoo!), I'd like to share with you an excerpt from my appearance on Mallorie Dunn's SmartGlamour podcast, Fashion for All. 

 

My being in this work is no accident – all the pieces developed over time and then fell together -- and yet I didn't see the grand pattern until recently. Our lives are mysterious and wonderful.

 

Mallorie Dunn: I actually don’t really know too much how you specifically got into all that. So were you doing general photography first and then figured out how to apply this body liberation to it, or was it like, “Oh, maybe I can learn more about photography so that I can do this work?”

 

Lindley Ashline: It was kind of both. I’ve been doing nature photography since about 2002 I think. My first camera was borrowed from my college library. This was the very early days of digital photography. And so, the first camera that I really used for sort of hobby-level photography took an actual floppy disc. You put an actual floppy disc in it and carry it around. The thing weighted like a thousand pounds. And it was big enough for a 3 ½” floppy. So I was carrying around a stack of floppy discs. And that was amazing for the first digital stuff.

 

But I was absolutely fascinated by digital photography. I grew up around people that did film photography, and that didn’t really catch me as much. But digital was cool and sexy and new.

 

So, I started doing nature photography that way. And I had been carrying it sort of ever since as a hobby, a much loved hobby. But I never thought about doing it professionally because fat people can’t be photographers.

And when I use the word fat, I want to be clear that I’m using it as a neutral descriptor of my own body and of the bodies of people who have reclaimed that word for themselves. I’m not using that as a negative quality.

 

But I just knew, I have absorbed from culture that fat people can’t be photographers. Who would want to work with a fat lady as their wedding photographer? So I never even considered it. It was always just this much-loved hobby.

 

And simultaneously, back in the days of LiveJournal—if anybody remembers that…

 

Mallorie Dunn: Oh, I certainly do.  I was a big LiveJournal user.

 

Lindley Ashline: Oh yeah… for about a decade, I was very, very dedicated to LiveJournal. And there were communities that were like modern Facebook groups I guess. And one of these that I just stumbled across—I guess somebody sent it to me—was based on plus-size fashion… and it was called Fatshionista. And it was all these amazing fat women being stylish and trendy and confident and living their lives and just being fabulous. And it blew my mind! It blew my mind.

 

I have very much grown up in this paradigm of if you are in a bigger body, there are lots and lots and lots of things you can’t wear or shouldn’t wear. And there aren’t very many things available in your size.

 

And what is there—if it’s bright colors, you’re not supposed to pick it anyway. So even out of what’s available, you’re always supposed to pick the most flattering things, the things that make you look the thinnest. So it just blew my mind! These women were wearing hot pink or wearing stripes.

 

For quite a while, I just sort of lurked and just sort of absorbed this amazing, new framework of thought. And eventually, I started doing my own outfit-of-the-day photos because that was very much in style that time, to do outfits-of-the-day or OOTDs. And so I started doing those.

 

And I was just sort of experimenting with the fashion. But what it actually started teaching me to do was to see my own body. Particularly, if you are in a body that is not mainstream approved—and everybody has body insecurities. Everybody with a human body does. But some bodies are more socially accepted than others. And particularly, the further away you are from that standard, the less likely you are to want to look at your body regularly.

 

You might glimpse at it in the mirror, or you might be in the background of somebody’s wedding photos, whatever, or you might be behind the camera because you don’t want to see yourself… we don’t look at ourselves regularly.

 

And so, I was forced to start looking regularly at my own body and normalizing that. And from there, from the Fatshionista community, I got linked over to Kate Harding who is a writer who at the time was doing really wonderful fat acceptance and very early body positivity writing. And from there, I discovered the science of bodies and the science of why we know that human bodies don’t really become slower permanently or in the long-term because that’s not how human bodies work—which I think is a little bit off-topic here. But we know scientifically that diets don’t work. And I tend to be very much an evidence-based person. If you tell me something cool, I want to see why. I want to know why.

 

And I have lived all my life seeing most of the bodies around me attempting to be smaller, the people in those bodies attempting to be smaller and failing. And now I knew why. Once again, it totally blew my mind. It changed my life.

 

And I started sort of lurking in those communities too, in fat acceptance communities. But I didn’t really do anything about it until about 2015. I was in a crappy dead-end job, a corporate job. And I had this photography skill. And I had this belief framework about the value of all bodies. And I kind of started dinking around on the internet looking at photography courses and professional photographers and see what their work was like. 

 

And there were just no larger bodies being photographed and shown on the internet—unless it’s for a specific thing, like maybe a very small plus-size model or some kind of diversity photoshoot where it was clearly like kind of token-is like, “Oh, look how diverse we are… we have one slightly larger model” who’s probably white.

 

So, as I started thinking about photography as a business, it was really obvious who my target market was going to be because a) nobody was serving these folks, people like me in these big bodies (so clearly, there was a market need for that) and b) I just got really mad about it like, “We deserve this too! We deserve this. Why is nobody serving larger bodies?

 

Why, in the photography community, larger bodies are like hush-hush.

It’s sort of acknowledged that you’ll have clients who are fat—like maybe the mother of the bride. That’s a classic one. And so you have these photography courses online that are otherwise wonderful. But then, there will be like a whole lesson on how to photograph the mother of the bride as if it’s Frankenstein’s bride.

 

Mallorie Dunn: Right!

 

Lindley Ashline: Fat bodies are just treated as this horrifying mystery in the photography community. And I got mad! Fat people deserve to have somewhere they can come and feel safe and accepted and attractive and worthy. And here we are five years later.

Warmly,
Lindley

 

P.S. You can share this week's letter here. Read or listen to the rest of this episode of Fashion for All here.

My favorite image this week:

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Image description: A fat white woman does a yoga pose at sunset among old industrial pipes. Use the stock photo >>

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From Me to You

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The Conversation

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This week's body mantra:

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Image description: A body love mantra that begins, “I honor your eyes.” Buy a printable poster book that includes this mantra.

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Quick Resources: Intuitive Eating Basics

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Coming Soon: CPAP Proud Buttons & Stickers!

One in 15 Americans has sleep apnea, but we don't talk about it. It's practically a taboo subject, possibly because apnea is correlated with fatness (though there's no proven causation).

 

One of the consequences of us not talking about it is that 80% of people with sleep apnea are undiagnosed. That's a lot of people whose health and lives are in danger in part because the condition is so highly stigmatized.

 

I designed these buttons so that those of us who use CPAP devices or want to show solidarity can help normalize sleep apnea and its treatment.

 

Look for both buttons and stickers in these designs in the shop soon! I'll also send out digital versions of the designs to Patreon supporters.

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I'm Lindley, and I work for liberation for all bodies

Image description: Lindley, a fat white woman, is shown shoulders up in a heart-patterned dress. She has blonde hair and glasses, and is smiling.

Hi! I'm Lindley.

 

I'm a photographer and activist (she/her, pronounced LIN-lee) who celebrates the unique beauty of bodies that fall outside conventional "beauty" standards. I live outside Seattle, WA. People come to me for:

  • Body-safe portrait, boudoir and small business photography sessions
  • Diverse, body-positive stock photos & fine art prints
  • Health at Every Size (HAES)-aligned editorial services and consulting
  • The Body Love Shop, a curated resource for body-positive and fat-positive art and products

Get details on all my offerings at bodyliberationphotos.com.

 

Pssst! Did a friend forward you this email? If you'd like to get your own body liberation guide every week, just drop your email address here.

 

You're on this list because you're a current or past client or customer, or you signed up on my website.

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