Holly Holder explores Yossi Loloi’s new photography project ‘FullBeauty’. Is this radical shift in the depiction of the female nude positive or simply shocking?

The female nude is one of the longest standing contentious issues in the History of Art. The depiction of beauty as virginal and pure, beginning with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, shows women as provocative and somewhat eroticized. Often curvaceous, standing or lying down they entice the viewer with their fabricated allure of long flowing hair and soft, slender limbs. Now in the 21st Century, Botticelli’s Venus is a long way from 36 year old Italian photographer Yossi Loloi’s images of morbidly obese women.

Photographs taken for Loloi’s new project ‘FullBeauty’ portray women who, at their lightest, weigh 30 stone. He believes his work is a “protest against discrimination”, and that our awareness of the health issues surrounding such women hinder our ability to appreciate them. Whilst Loloi’s points in defense of his work make perfect sense, I feel that once again the mask of art has blurred the reality of the matter. Lucien Freud’s earlier painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) shows an obese woman slumped on the sofa, asleep, naked cupping her breast in a reassuring manner. Sue Tilley, the named women in the painting is tender, soft, and calm but also unaware of our gaze. She is not eroticized, nor proud. Loloi’s women on the other hand are cast in a manner of defiance; one woman stands at the top of the stairs gazing out the window, her breast lops over the side of the banister and her body slumps forward from the weight of her excess. She stands with her head resting on her arm as if to say “you can look at me all you want but it won’t change who I am.”

once again the mask of art has blurred the reality of the matter

But the fact of the matter is that she does need to change who she is. Loloi is using these women as symbols of an alternative form of beauty, to alert society to our confined taste and opinions. Yet, as a viewer, I do not understand the need for an entire exhibition dedicated to morbidly obese women. Why not instead photograph the average woman and return to the Renaissance depiction of true beauty as flabby stomachs, child bearing hips and a Roman nose? In terms of the “health issue” as Loloi calls it, he may as well have photographed a man crippled by long term smoking, or a women hooked on drugs. Recently the Department of Health has produced a new advertising campaign called Health Harms which focuses on the fact that every 15 cigarettes smoked causes a mutation that can lead to cancer. Why then is it acceptable to glorify another form of addiction that leads to cancers, as well as other life harming diseases?

Realism is a hard dose of medicine in the society we live in

Loloi’s defense is that he was only using the obese women to “awaken” feelings in the viewer. He accepts that there would be either outrage or marvel at the photos, but does not mind so long as he determines society as “spoiled culturally”. I agree with Loloi- that society is warped by constant pressure to appear a certain way. Clothes that are manufactured only fit a certain figure, and we are constantly redefined through consumerist tactics. But Loloi’s retaliation only does more to accentuate the fact that as a society we have a warped view of what is acceptable. Ultimately, we should follow Freud’s view on life. Realism is a hard dose of medicine in the society we live in, but if we acknowledge our problems and addictions in modern culture then work such as Loloi’s should not have to be produced. As an artist he succeeds in awakening feelings, but as members of society he fails to positively change the way we view beauty.