New York Times Blog : Jen Davis

While on spring break 10 years ago in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Jen Davis decided to turn the camera on herself. But at 5-foot-4 and 260 pounds, this was not an easy thing to do. Sitting on a sandy beach mat in a tank top and shorts, surrounded by friends in more revealing swimwear, she triggered a cable release hidden under her foot.
“Originally, I wanted to see what the outside world saw when they looked at me,” said Ms. Davis, 33.
This image, titled “Pressure Point,” was the beginning of a self-portrait series that intimately chronicles Ms. Davis’s evolving relationship with her body. Often shot in natural light in her apartment or with friends, Ms. Davis’s photos have a documentary feel. However, they are art-directed moments borrowed from real life. In “Maxwell Street,” she orders from a Polish sausage stand in Chicago where she used to eat in college. In “Push-Up Bra,” she puts on a turquoise bra after getting out of the shower. Ms. Davis took the photo at her friend’s apartment to confront how uncomfortable she felt changing her clothes there.
But making a print in a communal darkroom caused even more discomfort. It was the first time she showed so much skin.
“I covered up the part that showed my body with a blank sheet of paper, and thought, ‘Do I really want to show this?’” remembered Ms. Davis, who recently began teaching a self-portrait class at the International Center of Photography. She held onto it for a week before showing anyone, and now describes it as an “anchor picture.”
In 2004, the camera became a way for Ms. Davis to experience what she felt she couldn’t in everyday life because of her weight. “Fantasy No. 1” shows her lying in bed in a man’s embrace. Her direct gaze almost startles.
“I wasn’t aware that I was even looking at the camera when I took this,” she said. “I wondered how it would feel like to be looked at that way by a man.”
But the mood shifts drastically after 2007. Posing reclined in a black bra with one strap off the shoulder, a sensual and relaxed sense of self emerges. Ms. Davis had just moved to New Haven, Conn., for a Master of Fine Arts in photography at Yale. Living in a new place made her feel more adventurous and for the first time, she was starting to open up to men, both physically and with her camera.
Although her confidence has emboldened over time, the same has not always been true for her public life. Ms. Davis has felt anxious riding the subway or eating a meal, aware of the potentially judging eyes of strangers. At times, she even felt self-conscious during an artist-in-residence program at Light Work, a photography nonprofit, when other people helped scan all her work.
“I saw myself over nine years, and my weight was just kind of the same,” she said. “I never stayed this way for the project, and I realized that I didn’t want to wake up in this body at 40. I had to take control of my body for health reasons.”
So she started exercising, eating better and in August 2011, had a silicone band placed around her stomach to restrict her appetite. She photographed herself examining sutures two days after surgery. She has since lost 70 pounds.
“This is probably the first time my work doesn’t feel super sad. It’s lighter, but I’m still judging and wondering, ‘Is this real or not? If I’m smaller, will I really be content?’ ”
You feel this sentiment in recent portraits. In one, she inspects her outstretched legs. In another, she stares at her reflection in a mirror with hands on hips and head slightly cocked.
“I’m feeling really great physically, but still trying to figure it out emotionally,” she said. “When I stand in front of the camera now, I don’t really know what I want to do.”