"There were a few people who knew about those pictures, but I didn’t show them publicly at all. I didn’t bother promoting myself."

"Even now, I don’t promote myself. I do photography because I love it. Money isn’t going to make a better picture for me and it is not going to make me happier. I wasn’t working for the work to be shown or seen, I was working for the pleasure of doing the work itself. I guess the reason I didn’t show my work is I was always busy going onto the next thing." 

From "Interview: Aaron Rose’s Coney Island" (Popular Photography, 2014).

What did you like about shooting at Coney Island? 

The gutsiness. To be amongst people in the flesh... where else can you find such a great array of shapes and forms? 

What were some of your favorite scenes to shoot at the beach? 

I liked the big fat men. When they laid down their bellies stuck out and bulged out. I just find it very comical, very cartoonish.... It’s the real people... kind of stark reality, in a very sunny atmosphere.... I used a Leica 35 mm camera with a wide-angle lens and a slight telephoto lens....

No one ever saw me taking their picture, that much I know.

How were you able to keep people from realizing that you were photographing them?

I would look, just like everybody else observing on the beach.... I would walk by with my camera on my side. I never put the camera up to my eyes. They never saw me taking their picture, but by that time I knew I already had the picture in my field and I just continued walking on...

 Lots of photographs at the link, where I got via "Aaron Rose, Photographer Whose Work Long Went Unseen, Dies at 84/Spurning commercialism, he made thousands of one-of-a-kind prints that for decades he largely kept to himself. Then came a show at the Whitney" (NYT). 

Mr. Rose was that rarest of artists: one who doesn’t chase after gallery shows or sales to deep-pocketed collectors. In a 1997 interview with The New York Times in advance of his Whitney Biennial debut, he explained that his low profile had been by choice. “All around me I saw people who became cynical and bitter when they didn’t get the recognition they thought they deserved, and I wanted to be free of that,” he said. “I wanted only to do my work, for myself, without any commercial influences.”...

You might guess that he was living on family wealth, but it was quite the opposite:

Aaron was raised in foster homes.... His introduction to photography came when a portrait photographer he had met at one of those foster homes hired him as an assistant to hold lights and reflectors....When Mr. Rose graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in 1955, he went into commercial photography and eventually began shooting pictures for his own pleasure.

On the side he collected antique hand tools, which proved a vital pastime: In the 1960s he sold his collection of tools to the Eli Lilly Company for a considerable sum, and in 1969 he used the proceeds to buy a building in SoHo, a neighborhood that was about to transition from industrial to trendy. He rented out part of the building to support himself and lived and worked in the rest...

Absolutely perfect!

Mr. Rose made his own cameras and other devices, and Rebecca Hackemann, who was his assistant and archivist from 1999 to 2005, said his studio was a sight to behold. “It was littered with glass and silver globes, optical devices and cameras he had built himself that replaced lenses with pinholes,” she said by email. “It was like walking into a different century.”

In his darkroom, he spurned the ready-made chemicals available from Kodak and other manufacturers; its walls were lined with bottles and cans full of mysterious substances....

"I originally saw this story somewhere other than WaPo that had pictures of the pastor, unlike WaPo, which just shows this skinny cross."

"The pastor is himself quite chubby. I guess WaPo chose to focus us on the serious sexism rather than the comedy."  

I wrote, over at Facebook, where my son John posted the WaPo article "Pastor says women may not be ‘epic trophy wife’ but should be thin for their husbands. He’s now on leave." 

WaPo illustrates its piece with a stock photo of a steepletop cross. 

The article I'd seen was in The Daily Mail: "Missouri pastor goes on leave after sexist sermon in which he told women to 'lose weight' and look less 'butch' as he hailed Melania Trump as 'the epic trophy wife.'"

You can listen to 22 minutes of the sermon here. 

The top-rated comments at The Daily Mail are about the pastor's own weight problem, so I can see why WaPo chose to exclude this part of the story. It's the Era of That's Not Funny. Don't be laughing. 

And by the way, the pastor was straining to be funny. Example:

“Praise God for makeup,” he said. “It’s like Bondo for dented vehicles. And it’s like crack filler for your drywall.”

Imagine going all the way to church and sitting there listening to that. I'd be thinking, man, I could watch any random stand-up special on Netflix. 

WaPo quotes an American studies professor, Kari J. Winter:

"Women are pressured from the time we’re born to believe that if we support patriarchal power, we’re going to be rewarded... The really toxic dynamic is it’s not so much which model of womanhood but that men in power have the right to define what a woman should look like and reduce her to her appearance.... Melania models that."

"Patients with underlying conditions were 12 times as likely to die of covid-19 as otherwise healthy people, CDC finds."

A WaPo headline, quoted along with substantial text from the article by my son John at Facebook, where I expressed surprise that the factor was so low and asked:

Did they count obesity as a "condition" when they did that calculation?

Then:

I looked at the CDC report, and I see it only counted "severe obesity (body mass index ≥40 kg/m2)" as a condition. I'm a 5'5" woman, and I would need to weigh more than 240 pounds — more than 100 pounds over normal weight — to enter that BMI range.

Obesity begins at a 30 BMI, which would be 180 pounds for my height. That's 60 pounds less than the weight the CDC counted as a "condition" when it did its calculation. It wouldn't be 12 times as likely but what? — 100 times? — if they'd included the merely obese. And what if they'd counted the overweight but not obese? That would go all the way down to 150 for my height. It would be useful to know, because we have some power over our own weight!

ADDED: My son questions my observation. The factor should be lower if they included less severe conditions. I agree with him. I'm thinking in terms of being less likely to die. When you're trying to figure out how dangerous the illness is to you, you consider how likely it is for a person in your condition to die if they get the disease. Perhaps it's the case that 99.9% of those who died of the disease were obese. Of course, that's not the same as saying if you get the disease and you're obese, you have a 99.9% chance of dying. But if the overall percentage of those who get the disease and die is 0.1%, then I'd like to know what's the percentage for those who get the disease but are not obese? Is it 0.01%? That would be extremely useful information! For one thing, it would give people something to do to protect themselves: lose weight. But also, it would show us who should continue the more extreme form of social distancing and who should feel free to get out and about.

"That seems to be more of this 'stuff has agency' trend that is going on. I did not do it, the gun just went off."

Says Todd in the comments to the post that talks — the post that talks! — about using the expression "release weight" instead of "lose weight."

It is NEVER ever MY fault. Stuff just happens, bad stuff anyway. Everyone owns the good stuff but bad stuff just happens.

In this case if the weight doesn't leave, well "it" chose to stay and it is NOT your fault!

But this made me think about the virus. It's just a thing. It has no mind. But we're encouraged to think of it as stuff with agency. Here's Trump, yesterday:

I view the invisible enemy as a war.... Hey, it’s killed more people than Pearl Harbor, and it’s killed more people than the World Trade Center. World Trade Center was close to 3,000. Well, we’re going to beat that by many times, unfortunately, so yeah, we view it as a war. This is a mobilization against the war. In many ways, it’s a tougher enemy. We do very well against the visible enemies. It’s the invisible enemy. This is an invisible enemy, but we’re doing a good job.

"Is it OK to rail against fat discrimination but still want to lose weight? Or does that make her part of the problem?"

"'I’ve had people question whether I truly love myself if I want to be thinner,' [said Anne Coleman, who weighs 200 pounds and considers herself to be 'body positive'].... 'I kind of feel stuck between people bashing me for having obesity and telling me I should lose weight, and the other half that says you should love yourself and that means you shouldn’t lose weight,' said Sarah Bramblette, 42, of Miami. 'I’m bad for wanting to lose weight, and I’m bad for not losing weight.'... Molly Carmel, 42, understands the conflict between wanting to be thinner and wanting to rebel against cultural norms. At her heaviest, she weighed 350. She lost 170 pounds from 'gastric bypass surgery and bulimia,' as she put it. Then she founded The Beacon Program, an eating disorder center in Manhattan. While she does weigh clients, she doesn’t let them see the number. 'I’m not saying to get into this skinny mini body... But when you’re eating in a way that’s supporting a really heavy body, it’s arguable that that’s self-love. When I weighed 325 pounds, I couldn’t get into the shower. My underwear stopped fitting. That girl deserves to release weight if she wants to, culture or no culture.'"

From "Fighting Fat Discrimination, but Still Wanting to Lose Weight/Is it OK to be 'body positive' while striving to be thinner?" (NYT).

That's an interesting expression: "release weight." It replaces "lose weight." It suggests the weight would like to go, and you're letting it, rather than that you're somehow oblivious and dropping it somewhere.

Is this language change being promoted? I'm not seeing much of it on the web, though I did find this article at a website called Wholistically You:

Years ago, my Wing Chun Sufi taught me that “we do not lose weight, we release weight”. At first I didn’t quite understand what he was saying, until he explained that whenever you lose something our instinctual nature as humans, is to find it or want it back. He went further to explain that if we truly wanted to lose something, or to give something up, then we needed to release it....

I adopted the language, understood the power behind what I was saying and watched as it manifested in my life, and in my lovely body. The results I have garnered have been life altering....

We do not achieve results. We garner them.

"Fat cells produce large amounts of a protein used by the coronavirus to infiltrate human cells, researchers have warned..."

"... pointing to a potential explanation for why obese people are more severely affected....  Fat cells in obese or diabetic patients produce higher amounts of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (Ace2) than those in other people. It is the protein that the coronavirus binds to in the bodies of infected people, they said.... [F]at might therefore 'serve as a viral reservoir.'"

The London Times reports on a study published in the journal Obesity.