Snapchat Food Diaries

The labour I’ve been looking at is the emotional labour around eating. For me eating is really difficult, I don’t enjoy it and it’s mentally draining for me to do so, even more, to keep my friends and whānau up to date with my eating habits via social media to hold my accountability in eating. I’m currently being assessed at an eating clinic and they suggested that I do this as a means to make sure I at least eat something once a day. 

Because of my people-pleasing tendencies, this would be a great way to keep track of my journey because otherwise, my friends, whānau, and my partner will message me asking where’s the post which then, in turn, makes me feel bad and so I will put some kai together and post about it. Even if it makes me emotionally exhausted in doing so.

Every time I manage to eat something I will take a photo of it with the caption, “eating”, and post it to a private group on my Snapchat. I’ve been doing this since the start of April and have collected all my submissions to the Snapchat story since this brief started. I’ve managed to put together a completely filled-up A3 page of images of proof that I’ve eaten and uploaded to my private story on Snapchat. 

Snapchat is an ‘informal’ device, not commonly used in photography because you can’t really control any of the photographic settings and the images. But, that doesn’t make it less useful as an art-making tool, but rather that it was an interesting way of making art that not many would even consider using. Once put into collated and all of the images sized into rows onto photoshop, then the “low quality” Snapchat images begin to look like something that could be considered “art.”

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As you can see above on the top right image are just some of the emotions of the labour I have when doing these entries. The whole process is overwhelming and difficult but I keep with it to keep my friends, whānau, and partner less worried. Also to try and heal from my bad eating habits of just not eating in general.