“Body Positivity, the Nude Figure, and Online Censorship: A Conversation with Artist Grey Johnson,” Interview and Art.

In 2024, Wesley R. Bishop and Bessie Rigakos published a book about the body size activism movement. Titled Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism, the book relied on interviews and oral histories with over a dozen activists and artists related to body size activism and/or who had been censored by companies such as Meta for their online work. The following is one of those interviews with the artist Grey Johnson. This excerpt has been edited for clarity and length.

Wesley Bishop: Hello, thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Can you begin by giving us a bit of your background?

Grey Johnson: Yeah, I am a fine-art nude portrait photographer based in Washington, D.C. I’ve been shooting on my own now since 2016, and I was inspired to shoot particularly by the body positive movement that’s been going on a few years. Also at that time in the mid-2010s, I had a few health issues that inspired me to make a couple of changes about my life. I ended up taking some art classes and in those art classes, I met with a few photographers. And then the models that I worked with also inspired me to start producing art like this, because I felt like in the world of fine art—particularly nude photography— there just wasn’t a whole lot of representation other than certain body types on display. I decided to go out and start my journey.

WB: Can you clarify a little bit about when you were taking these art classes. What kind of representation of bodies were you seeing specifically?

GJ: Yeah, absolutely. The bodies in the classes were very diverse, very diverse. Art models aren’t like glamor models; [with] a lot of glamor models you have to fit a particular mold, same with fashion models. You have to fit a certain type. [But in art school] when you’re drawing or painting the figure, the figure’s going to come in different shapes, sizes, ages… It’s more of a representation of reality. It’s more of a representation of life. So when you go to class, those are going to be the type of models you see.

WB: Where did you go to art school?

GJ: I went to MCAD, Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

WB: When you were doing these art classes, was this the first time you saw that kind of array of different bodies or had you seen that before in art?

GJ: It was the classes primarily. I think occasionally there were a few photographers out there, usually women, where you would see more varied body type. There would be more diverse body types or more diverse people that they would typically shoot, but I saw it represented primarily in my art classes. So, yeah.

WB: Interesting. Do you want to offer any other information on your learning about body-size activism?

GJ: Yeah, sure. I’ve had a lot of exposure growing up with different people, different cultures, which is funny, because I grew up in South Carolina, so I didn’t get to experience a whole lot of diversity there. But in the summers I would run track. And so when running track, you meet people, you meet kids from different parts of the country, so then with that, I was exposed to just being around a lot of different people, a lot of different body types there, but the caveat, I guess, was you just get to see people as humans, you get to see people as human beings.

And so I think, for me, that’s where things started, that was the seeding. And then I’ve always been drawn to the human body as an art subject. And when I was younger, you’d go to the museum, you’d see the classical nudes and Greek sculpture. Or you would see the paintings, like Rubens-style paintings. And so that had always been considered as art or very artistic. And I always felt like in photography, of course there’s a lot of taboo around the nude in and of itself, in photography seems like if you draw it or sculpt it’s a little bit more accepted, but if you take the photo then it’s usually seen as a little bit more taboo, which just bothers me.

But anyway, I think I wanted to bring that to light. I wanted to shed some light on this contradiction and say, ‘Hey, this is not something that’s taboo.’ And then also bring more representation to it. Because there just wasn’t a whole lot of representation to it. So it was something that didn’t happen immediately for me; it’s definitely been a process of going from point A to point B, going to where I started out and then making that transition into where I’m at with it today.

WB: Maybe this isn’t possible, but could you pinpoint a date, or even year, where you were like, ‘oh, okay, this is body size activism. This is body diversity and body positivity?’

GJ: Gosh, I would say probably around 2012, 2013 is when I got wind of it. And I was looking back in this time, Tumblr was still around. So you would find tons of reference materials on Tumblr. And I ran across a body positive activist who was doing self-portraits. She was a woman, and she was from New York. I think she was in her late thirties at the time. And her story was, she had been through a recent divorce. She had always had self-limiting images about her body.

And then once she got out of her relationship—she was in a pretty abusive relationship—she started taking self-portraits and photos of herself.

And it was very therapeutic when she talked about it. She was able to describe how she looked in front of the mirror, how the lighting looked on her body from a different angle. And when she was taking the picture... [she could see] herself as beautiful [and] as attractive [and] having these feelings of ‘I’m worthy and I’m desirable and I have something to offer.’

So that was the very first thing that I realized, ‘Hey, there’s something that’s going on here.’ And that eventually led to the next thing, which led to the next thing, which eventually led me to being in the class.

WB: So, this was all Tumblr, right. Yeah. When did you first make the jump to Instagram?

GJ: I think for Instagram, I made that jump in 2014, somewhere around that time. When I started Instagram, I had just gotten out of some of my art classes. And I was drawing and I was painting and I had a friend tell me about Instagram and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever.’ So officially I said, ‘All right, you’ve been following long enough. Just put something up there, put anything up there.’ And I put some of my artwork up there, some of my paintings and stuff like that. I did that for maybe a year or two. And then I took a workshop on fine art photography.

I was so nervous because it’s like, ‘oh my God.’ I was thinking about putting some of the photos from that workshop on there, and I was completely, totally nervous about it. Eventually I said, ‘okay, just do it, just bite the bullet, just do it.’ And I put it up there and I got a lot of positive responses from it, which blew me away because I wasn’t expecting that at all. I really felt like my work wasn’t good enough. And the first few photos that I put up there, I got nothing but love from it. It was very exciting.

WB: Was there anything specific that made you conscious of what your art was doing in terms of the body-size activist movement?

GJ: I think I did it unconsciously, I guess not even thinking about it because for me, when I started out, this was the type of photography that I wanted to do, I wanted to show that diversity. And then as I started posting, I started getting more feedback. I started getting a lot more positive feedback in particular people who hadn’t even modeled before would tell me, ‘I love your work. I love what you do, it’s gorgeous; it’s beautiful. I don’t see a lot of things like that. That looks like me. I don’t see like a lot of representation that looks like me.’ And so I think I started out unconsciously knowing this is where I wanted to go.

Since then, I got wrapped up into and enveloped into the movement and just got a lot more exposure into it. I’ve had models, a couple of models who come out and said that they changed up the way that they model. So they used to be more of a glamor model now, but they really wanted to do artwork, more traditional art modeling. And then after working with me, they were like, “Okay, I’m not going to do the glamor anymore. I really just want to focus on art,” which was very positive. It was really good.

WB: Circling back to something you said— why do you think there is a stigma? It sounds like even in the art world there’s an attitude against photography of nudes, but like you said, if you draw it or sculpt it. The taboo’s not there. What do you think that’s about?

GJ: Yeah, I’m not 100% sure. This is just all opinion. I think a lot of times the perception is, ‘oh, if you’re a man, then you’re not really wanting to create art anyway. You just want to see or create these nudes. You just want to take nude photos.’ And so I think there’s a stigma based around that. And then also too, I think photography is a fairly new art form; it’s one of the youngest art forms; I guess it’s only been around for maybe 100 years or a little over 100 years or so.

And so, people are still trying to figure out how they feel about it. People have been sculpting for thousands of years, people who have been painting for even longer than that. So, those forms have been around, and are more comfortable for people, whereas the camera and photography as an art form is something people are still trying to figure out, I think.

WB: That’s well said. Is the accusation against nude photography that it’s just pornography?

GJ: It depends on the individual. Depends on who you talk to. Some people are going to be a little bit more open to the idea of understanding than others. Other people are going to be a little bit more closed off to it. So, it’s hard to tell. I guess if I was speaking in generalizations, I tend to think that a lot of what people think, ‘yeah, he’s a guy, he’s a nude photographer. He just wants to shoot nudes. He just wants to shoot naked women. And so that’s all he wants to do.’ There’s really no interest in the art. There’s really no interest in trying to create a meaningful image.

WB: Shifting gears a bit, how do you define body positivity?

GJ: For me, I think it all stems from empowerment. You have to feel comfortable in your skin mentally. You have to be comfortable with who you are. And I think being body positive would be accepting of who you are, accepting yourself on your terms/ One of my models is like, ‘I don’t seek permission and I’m not looking for acceptance or to prove myself.’ I think that has to be the premise of it. Just being comfortable with who you are, being comfortable with yourself and allowing yourself flaws. I mean, who doesn’t have flaws? Everybody has flaws. Right? Everybody has something about them that they don’t like, or maybe something that’s perceived as weakness.

But the difference is just owning it and making the most of it and just pushing forward because things in life change all the time and something you may have as a flaw one day could be your strength literally a week from the day. So being open to who you are and being open to change and just accepting that and accepting your humanity, I guess that’s a long answer, but that’s how I think of it. I think that’s the base of body positivity.

WB: In your opinion how does traditional media portray body images and how does social media portray body images?

GJ: Open any magazine, look at any commercial, sure things have changed maybe within the past five years or so, but the traditional body is there. I mean, there’s a certain body type, right? It’s a certain look that you must have which gets exalted and held above others. You see it literally decade after decade, year after year, nothing changes. And there’s a whole swath of people out there who don’t look like that, who can’t identify with that. And I think even a lot of times the people that are propped up with that image don’t even identify with it because it’s just not realistic.

Ultimately, it’s a filter. It is this filter and it’s great for the commercial. It’s great for the ad that’s trying to sell you something. But realistically there’s no teeth behind it because nobody looks like that all the time. Nobody lives their life like that all the time. I think we do ourselves a great injustice if we think that’s the expectation to look like that.

In the case of social media, it’s a little bit better, but that’s because the creators are not sitting in an advertising office in LA or New York telling everybody what to think. The creators with the social media aspect, it’s a little bit more ‘power to the people.’ You as a creator can create your vision and you can put it out there for people to take in which I like, because again, it puts power back into your hands.

In social media, you don’t have to go through the gatekeepers. You don’t have to filter your work to appease a certain industry that’s selling to a snippet of the population to buy a product. It’s just like, ‘no, I’m not necessarily selling your product. What I want you to have is a feeling, what I want you to take in is an emotion and acceptance and being comfortable.’ That’s the ‘product.’ I think that’s the biggest difference in social media, but I think too, you’re getting a lot of pushback from that, from the people who own these platforms, where they don’t necessarily want that type of representation for whatever reason. That’s the feeling that you get a lot of times when your work gets singled out for censorship.

WB: Why do you think owners of these platforms pursue that censorship?

GJ: Because they have an audience, they have investors, right? So they have people dropping off money, advertisers giving them money. They have resources and they have to decide on where they’re going to put their money, where they’re going to put their time and their effort, and who’s going to give them the most bang for their buck. So obviously it goes down to money again, who can pay you. Pay to play.

And so, if someone donates millions of dollars to prop a social media platform up, they’re going to get more leeway and to do things like, ‘this is the image that we want to allow. This is the image that we want to portray.’ I think a lot of it stems from that. It’s not a fair world. They don’t want to play ball. They don’t want to allow everyone to be able to create expressively.

WB: This is a question that has come up again and again as we started these interviews. There’s these issues of censorship on social media platforms, right? The censors target certain types of bodies along the lines of disability, race, body size, politics, etc. The question that I’ve been posing to people is if this is a money-making device, and these platforms are there to make a profit, fat sells. There is clearly a market here. There are people who want to see this diversity. People want to like it. They want to share it. So in your opinion, why would these social media platforms hinder their profits by removing content that is wildly popular?

GJ: I’m not sure. I think a lot of it is intertwined. The best way I can describe it is there’s an anticipation of a type of person who’s creating this content is eventually going to do something wrong. That’s the anticipation, I think. So you’re not really seen as creator and that you have a positive message. I think because you’re small-time, not very well known, the images that you’re posting or that borderline, but because Playboy gives us millions of dollars. We’re going to allow them to post more race content, versus this new upstart, this guy that’s pretty low on the totem pole does. And so it’s easier to scapegoat.

Now if these companies start seeing dents in their bottom line from censoring, then that’s when you may start seeing a change. But as long as they’re getting millions of dollars from outside corporations, I think it’s like— what’s the word I want to say— it’s like a cost-benefit analysis. So they’re willing to sacrifice some of the users. That’s what I believe where this stems from.

WB: For these other companies that post on social media, they are notorious about pushing a certain type of body image that is unhealthy, is racist, is ableist, is fat phobic. Why, in your opinion, do these companies do this? Now that they have seen there are people posting just with small cameras and small studios and they’re getting hundreds of thousands of followers. Why do you think that big corporations wouldn’t want a piece of that action?

GJ: It’s because it’s innovating. For the corporations, they sell product, they’re selling a company. And so, they’re still worried about the investment. They’re not going to do anything different than what’s already been done before.

And when you throw something in there, like a new product that they’re not so quite so sure about, they’re like, ‘oh, well, we sell peaches. We know we do really well with peaches,’ but all of a sudden you take it to a market where somebody’s not familiar with the banana and you bring a banana in there. They’re going to be like, ‘oh, what is this? I really don’t like your peaches, but now I don’t know what this fruit is. This looks weird. Not only am I not going to buy your peaches anymore, I’m going to buy your competitors’ peaches.’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t want to be associated with anybody who sells this weird fruit.’ So they’re scared. They’re just terrified. Once they can see the profit from it consistently, then I think that’s what changes for them. So that’s why you start seeing things that are a little bit more inclusive now, because this is their test phase. This is what they’re testing it out to see if it’s going to be profitable for them to do that.

And so that’s how I see it coming from a business standpoint. It’s just either you have a catalyst that accelerates things immediately for whatever reason, or it’s going to be pretty much a traditional tried and true method, the methodology that makes money. Why are they going to change anything?

WB: Can you talk a little about online censorship? This is how you came into the radar of this project. I saw you posting about the censorship, started following you to learn more, and became a fan of your work. 

GJ: Thank you!

WB: When did the censorship initially begin? Has it morphed over time?

GJ: I remember the first photo I had taken down was probably a year and a half after I started posting my photographs. At that time, Instagram was a little bit more liberal with what it allowed you to post but now has got a lot more restrictive. I posted a model, she was in a profile a side view and her nipple was exposed. I didn’t even realize that her nipple was exposed. And I came back and I was like, ‘why did they take my photo down?’ And so I looked and I was like, oh.’ I was like, ‘really?’ You could barely see it. It was like a little peak of a nipple that was there. And so that was the very first time I had a photo removed.

Since that time I’ve had several photos taken down. I don’t get a justification. I follow the guidelines. I don’t show any full front nudity. A lot of my stuff that I show is implied. I’ll blur the nipples out. I’ll blur the crotch out, nothing that I show or shoot or that I post is intended as sexual. But I’ve had stuff removed recently here for sexual solicitation, which blew my mind because I’m like, ‘there’s nothing here.’ And I’ve noticed other photographers and other body-positive accounts will have the same thing done to them. Their photos will be taken down for sexual solicitation. So it’s like, they’re no longer targeting nudity. Now they’re trying to imply we are doing sexual solicitation. And, ironically, unlike Playboy, I don’t sell mock photos monthly.

So, I’m not doing, by definition, what you’re saying I’m doing. It’s really frustrating because I’ve had several photos recently taken down and it says sexual solicitation. I’ve had photos taken down particularly of models who have been curvier, models who have larger breasts, models who have larger buttocks. Instagram takes those down often. And it doesn’t matter what color skin they are, what the age seems to be. It’s just the fact, for whatever reason, the algorithm or whatever deems it as nudity and sexual nature. It’s frustrating because with your voice and your platform, you want to be able to display a larger diversity, but then you find yourself being very limited of what you can do because your stuff gets censored.

WB: Have you ever had your Instagram account deleted?

GJ: It has not been deleted. It has been disabled for about a week because of the same similar things. When my photos were taken down, it was disabled. I had to reapply for it and basically plead my case and say, ‘look, I do not sell pornography. I’m not a pornographer. I’m an artist. This is what the intent of my account is.’ And I told them, ‘it’s a fine-art nude account. I follow the guidelines. I’m not asking anybody to send me money. This is my platform. And the account that I have is very similar to a lot of other accounts that are out there.’ Again Playboy.

WB: How does it make you feel that there are literally accounts like Playboy that are permitted to exist on Instagram? Same with Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Kardashian who post full nudes.

GJ: It makes you feel slighted. You’re following the guidelines, you’re following the rules, but you’re not given the opportunity to express equally or fairly. You have influencers with more clout and they’re showing full nudity, they’re breaking the rules, but they get away with it. Whereas you’re following the rule and you’re being penalized for it. You’re being overwatched for it. Again, it goes back to an expectation that, ‘okay, well you’re going to do something bad. So therefore, we need to keep our eye and focus on you.’ It’s very frustrating because it goes against what you’re trying to do. It goes against what you’re trying to create. You should have that freedom to express, and I’m all about fairness.

If you’re going to call it, call it both ways down the middle, just so that we can all be on the same page and move forward. Don’t single certain people out and try to hold them to another standard because whatever reason you may have, whatever bias that you may have, don’t single people out and try to hold them to a different standard versus somebody else who is going to be a little bit more popular. That’s what’s really frustrating about it.

WB: Have you received any negative comments from other users?

GJ: Very rarely. Typically, none. None recently. Occasionally I’ll get something, but it’s very rare. It’ll be something stupid about the image, about the person’s weight or something like that. And it’s my platform. So anytime somebody says something stupid or something negative, I don’t even play with it. I don’t respond to it. I delete the comment, and I block them because this is not what I’m facilitating. This is my world. And this is what I’m going to do. I’m about being positive. And if you can’t play with others in the sandbox, then get out. Life is short. We don’t have time for this. I don’t even put up with it, yeah. I don’t know. But no, I haven’t received a whole lot of negative comments, so not so much.

WB: Final question, in your opinion, how can people start promoting body positivity and combating fat phobia?

GJ: Just be open, just be open, don’t accept yourself as an outlier. Don’t accept yourself as an ‘other.’ Wrap yourself and develop yourself in the mainstream and jump in with the herd, jump in with the flow, jump in the river and just start swimming. That is the only way to do it. Because then from that point I feel like we start to normalize things. And then you’re not an outlier. You’re not ostracized, you’re not left out.

I say that just from experience. Growing up as a minority in America, there’s just not a whole lot of room to do otherwise. For me growing up, there just wasn’t a whole lot of representation that was there where I could see myself. Unless you were either an athlete or either you’re some type of entertainer or something.

And there’s this whole swath of Black America that exists. That’s the undercurrent. And the only way to get people to see that it exists is for you to jump in there. You let people know that ‘hey, my father’s a doctor. Hey, my aunt’s a judge. Hey, my uncle’s a bus driver.’  There doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other where you type cast.

Be yourself, be open, be honest, be upfront, and be empowered.

Eventually the momentum catches on. Because then you start influencing other people and they’re like, ‘hey, that’s a great idea. I have some friends who feel the same way. Maybe we should get together and get a club.’  The club leads to an organization, an organization leads to a movement. The movement leads to filling in the gap.

Put yourself out there. Don’t ask for their permission because you don’t need it. You’re fine as you are. You don’t need the acceptance and you don’t need the approval. Just have that ownership of yourself and empower yourself and keep making moves. That’s what I would say.

WB: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you sitting down to talk with us.

GJ: Thank you.