Usually, the ‘weight loss’ images we’re exposed to only involve models on TV advertorials, or smiling celebrities who’ve struck million-dollar deals with major names like Jenny Craig. There are brightly coloured crop tops, tiny shorts and stretch-mark-free tightly toned stomachs.
But a new series of intimate self-portraits by Brooklyn-based photographer Jen Davis, snapped over a decade, documents a much more honest weight loss journey.
Davis began the photographic project almost by accident: she was stuck for ideas as an undergraduate student in 2002, The Telegraph reports, and started taking photos of herself to kick-start the creative process.
The series soon became a quest to achieve a better understanding of herself and her size, Davis told The Telegraph — and last year, looking back over her collected self-portraits, she realised that she actually wanted to shed some of the extra weight she was carrying.
“I had this archive of myself from the last nine years and I realised how nothing had really changed. My body hadn’t changed. I thought, ‘I don’t want to wake up at 40 and be in the same body’,” she told The Telegraph.