Clad only in a black tank top and underwear, 33-year-old Julie Davis walked across an East Columbus cotton field holding a piece of paper.
A camera, prepared to capture the moment for posterity, trained on Davis as she revealed the paper’s message and posed.
“If you lost weight, you’d be beautiful,” the paper read.
After a few camera clicks, Davis dropped that message into the dirt, trading it for another piece of paper she held forward for a photo.
“I am God’s work of art” filled the page, and a smile lit her face.
Davis, of Columbus, was one of 17 similarly clad women of all shapes, sizes and ages taking part in the photo shoot on July 24.
Photographer and Columbus native Jess Fielder called her statement photo shoot “Project: Self Love,” and it has gained a significant social media following since she posted her work on Facebook. The point was to show that there was so much more value to these women than what one could see on the surface.
Fielder asked the women who joined her to write on a plain sheet of paper destructive words someone had said to them. On a second sheet of paper, she had the women write something positive about themselves.
“I wanted it to be an empowering message. I wanted them to take ownership,” the photographer said. “The moment when people put down the first card and held up the second, everybody lit up.”
A spark of inspiration
“You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother. You don’t owe it to your children. You don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female.”
Those words, from journalist and blogger Erin McKean, inspired Fielder, who now lives in New Jersey, to invite Golden-Triangle area women to join in her statement photo shoot — a shoot she didn’t know would speak so loudly.
“Every single woman has to deal with being judged first on their appearance,” Fielder said. “I know all people have to deal with that, but I feel like it’s more so for women. We have to deal with being made to feel like our value comes from our appearance. All of us are so much more than that, and it’s unfair.”
For Davis, a boy she knew in high school had uttered a comment about her weight, and the message stuck. Her experience with Project: Self Love, she said, helped her shake off that negativity.
During weeks leading up to the photography shoot, Davis worked toward better health. She approached the experience with the hope that seeing pictures of herself in minimal clothing would inspire her to continue going to the gym. The “mind-opening” shoot, however, turned her negative thoughts to ones of positivity and acceptance.
“I was kind of negative about it toward myself,” Davis said of her experience behind the lens. “Afterward, that’s not even a thought in my mind.”
Riley Gordon, 24, of Starkville, saw the opportunity to participate in the photo shoot on a Facebook page. As a “body positivity” supporter, she seized the opportunity.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt as empowered and beautiful as I did after that shoot,” Gordon said. “I actually knew nobody there. But when I got there … it felt really welcoming. There was no judgment allowed because we were all sharing something that was really hard to open up and share with people.”
Coming home
Fielder decided to tackle the photo shoot during a vacation visiting her grandmother, Lori Neely, and family members.
She contacted friends and family before traveling to Columbus and asked them to help. She hoped they would spread the word to spark interest and recruit women to take part. What started with a relatively small group of five women quickly grew.
Fielder shot the photos in a cotton field near her grandmother’s home on Phillips Hill Road.
Her grandmother, 77, and great-aunt, Jonnie Schoenrock, 69, both participated.
“It’s so different from anything I ever thought I’d do in my life,” Schoenrock said.
“It was personal, but evidently it was personal for a lot of other women.
“They saw themselves in us, and that feels good,” she added, referring to the comments and publicity the project has attracted on Facebook. “When I first saw the photos, I felt self-conscious, and some of the comments made me feel self-conscious. But what made me feel better is the amount of women who would jump in and defend us. They would say ‘That’s exactly how I feel.'”
Another participant, 25-year-old Sara Conner of Columbus, praised the project’s uniting power.
“Every single person there has a different story and a different background,” Conner said. “Though we might have felt alone in (our insecurities) before, we realized there are people almost every day who are going through the same thing. Mothers, and women in general, need to be positive and lift each other up because we are each other’s biggest supporters.
“We’re the only ones that can understand what each other are going through,” she added.
Lessons learned
Conner, who has a young daughter, said she thinks Fielder saw an opportunity to bring to light an issue many people avoid.
“I think she saw an opportunity that nobody talks about. With everything going on in the world right now, it’s so important for people, especially women, to be confident,” Conner said. “I think she wanted to give all of us an opportunity to have a voice.”
According to participants, the project’s overarching message is powerful and should be spread: Learn to love each other for one’s passions, for their talents and character, no matter what someone’s appearance might suggest. And most importantly, learn to love yourself.
Fielder and the 17 other women want their own daughters, granddaughters, nieces and girls all over the world to take this lesson to heart.
“I have a 6-year-old daughter,” Fielder said. “I think every single generation is getting a little bit better and more open-minded, but for me it’s important, especially because I have a daughter. I want her to be able to grow up with (body positivity) in her face — that it is OK no matter what you look like; that you’re more than that.”
Davis and Gordon both echoed that sentiment.
“I have a niece who’s seen (the project), and she thought it was wonderful,” Davis said. “She talked about how beautiful everybody was. She worries about (her appearance) all the time. Just knowing that it makes a difference for somebody like her, makes it all worthwhile.”
“If I could do it all over again, I would do it a hundred times,” Gordon added, “because I think the messages we put out to the world are something that all women should hear, and especially little girls, so they know that there’s so much more to women than their appearances.”
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