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.