This Friday, we are excited to feature Substantia Jones on the blog!
Substantia Jones is the founder of and photographer for the photo-activism campaign, The Adipositivity Project, and runs both FatPeopleFlippingYouOff.com and UppityFatty.com. She has spoken about body politics on NPR, Sirius/XM, and The Pacifica Radio Network, as well as a number of podcasts and on radio stations in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. She’s also the producer and host of the four-part radio series PolitiSIZE on WBAI-FM in New York City. She’s contributed to books by Random House, Seal Press, Ten Speed Press, and Vignette, and lectures annually on her photography at Parsons School of Design, The New School in New York City. Substantia is also curator of the Body Image Channel at Waywire.com.
The Adipositivity Project aims to promote the acceptance of benign human size variation and encourage discussion of body politics, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence, but rather through a visual display of fat physicality that is normally unseen. The idea is described on her website as “part fat, part feminism, part ‘fuck you.'” She began the Adipositivity project in 2007, with images of a few friends as well as her own self portraits. Her wish was to represent fat bodies in a way that is rarely done: Positively and (often) completely nude. Since then, the momentum around her efforts has picked up as the project has moved hand in hand with the body positivity movement.
Her award-winning photography has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the globe, most recently in group art exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London, the Steiischer Herbst Arts Festival in Graz, Austria, Lesbiche in Sardinia, Italy, and in 2016 there was a two-month solo exhibition of her photographs at Te Manawa Museum in Palmerston North, New Zealand.. Her work has been featured in an on international news outlets.
Photo-activist Substantia Jones created, manages, and is sole photographer for the 10-year-old fat acceptance campaign, The Adipositivity Project, hosting a diverse and growing collection of hundreds of her photographs of fat people of all genders, mostly women, mostly nude. She describes the project as “feminism, f*ckyouism, and fat.” Her photography has been featured in books, magazines, and news outlets. She lectures internationally, and her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the globe.
She shared with Vice, “photography is a tool commonly used and manipulated to convince people—particularly women—that they’re unworthy in their natural state; that they need to swallow what the $66 billion a year US weight loss industry is feeding them. The Adipositivity project is about taking that concept and subverting it, using photographs to promote self-love and ask people to embrace their natural state.”
Any project inspiring people to embrace exactly who they are and the body they have is a project we can get behind! Thank you, Substantia, for empowering people everywhere with your art.
Follow Substantia on Instagram, Twitter & Facebook
Check out her website here.
