Jen Davis-- Candice Beasley

http://jendavisphoto.com/

  This Brooklyn based photographer just may be the most interesting and important photographer to me. Her pieces deal with body image, beauty, and identity, which are powerful topics these days. Her pieces are composed in a way that every component can be translated into a language, where it then provides more insight to the subject and the photo, as a whole.
  Her self portraits are especially meaningful to me. Here you have a full figured woman, who is comfortable enough with herself to take very intimate pictures, some nude and semi nude, and is seemingly unashamed of her form. Which is how many tend to view themselves, confident, when people are watching. Yet, in the few pictures she has where food is present, the food is not touching her lips and she is not looking at the food, or she is looking at the food and not eating. The only exceptions to this being in the photo where she is eating an orange but she is looking out the window, and when she is eating a grape, or something, and is looking to the floor.
  Being that in many of self portraits, her face is either out of focus, obscured, or her eyes are closed, I get the sense that her self portraits are directed to her form and how others view it, which is seemingly beauty and with acceptance, and how she views it.
The latter of which is displayed in pictures where she is alone and is either facing the camera or has made eye contact with the camera. And as the pictures become more recent, her mood, self-confidence and self-respect are evolving and she is becoming more comfortable with who, how she looks today, and how she looked in the past. This is why she is in the lead to becoming one of my favorite, if not my favorite, photographer.