Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

In 2002, while a college student on spring break, Jen Davis first turned to self-portraiture to address her own insecurities about her body. Her ten-year photography project explored not only personal issues related to self-image, love, and loneliness but also societal pressures of “ideal” beauty and prejudices against obese people. Despite their rawness, there is beauty in Davis’s images, which she could not see in herself. This intimate picture, the first by Davis in our collection, suggests the turban-wearing, shapely beauties in harem or bathing scenes by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Peter Paul Rubens, and Pierre Auguste Renoir, also raising questions about the objectification of the female body in the history of art.