Campaign//American Beauty
Issue 02/ November 2015
IM//November Issue
Imperfection is perfection
American Beauty Awareness campaign empowering women of color.
Atlas of Beauty Photographer travels the world to depict real beauty in every culture
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WOMEN OF CONTENTS
EDITOR LETTER 03
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The editor shares her thoughts on this month’s issue.
WOMEN IN THE NEWS 05
Suzanne Fields discusses the challenges women of color are facing in politics today.
MY FAVORITE “F” WORD—FEMINISM 13
Discussing Maya Angelou’s impact on feminism, and how it has changed history for women of color.
DESIGN 19
Arabian designer Sara Al Naimi describes her experience with emerging as a serious designer.
EXPERIENCES 23
Women of color from all over the world share their stories, and aim to empower each other.
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EXPOSE 2014 Women of all shapes, sizes, and colors shatter the media’s definition of beauty, and show us their glorious bodies!
LOVE YOUR LINES A photo campaign aimed at women of color to embrace their stretch marks and celebrate their bodies and lines!
AMERICAN BEAUTY San Francisco based photographer shatters what American media has defined as beauty by recreating the iconic American beauty scene.
ATLAS OF BEAUTY A deeply personal and on-going project to celebrate our planet’s astounding diversity and beauty through portraits of women from every country and culture.
Loving your lines A Beautiful Photo Project Is Empowering Women to Embrace their Stretch Marks, and share photos of them
L O V E Y O U R S T R IP E S
Im Magazine//November Issue
Gossip magazines, the cosmetic industry and Agony Aunts have long fuelled the idea that stretch marks are embarrassing. Creams and lotions insist that stretch marks should be hidden and erased. It’s one more front in the fight with impossible beauty standards, but luckily one project is encouraging people to embrace their stretch-marked bodies just as they are. The account was started by two East Coast moms, who asked to remain anonymous. The creators were inspired to feature the stretch marks and other lines on women’s bodies after a discussion about how their own bodies had changed after bearing children. They started the Instagram account, put out a call for submissions, and were stunned by the response they got in just one night. Their Instagram account, Love Your Lines, has attracted more than 24,000 followers since its first post on Aug. 12, and has received an onslaught of positive comments for its photos of “real women.” By encouraging people to capture and flaunt their stretch marks, the project hopes to give women the needed confidence to embrace their so-called “imperfections” and draw inspiration from the community they have created. “We created the account to inspire women of all ages, sizes and cultural backgrounds,” the anonymous Instagram administrators told
The project hopes to give women the confidence to embrace their so-called “imperfections”
Campaign//Love your lines
Mic by email. “We started the campaign on a whim, after a few discussions about our bodies after motherhood. The response has been phenomenal and we are so honored. We knew women would be able to relate, but we were not expecting such an overwhelming response.” Each caption on their black-and-white images shares the story of the woman who submitted the photo. “I’ve had my lines since middle school,” one single woman writes. “I used to be embarrassed and hide them, tried cocoa butter and fade creams. I’ve learned to fully embrace it. Now I can walk down the beach, no cover up, they’re forever a part of me and my lines are beautiful.” The campaign gives women the choice of revealing their identity, though the project’s creators said that they have chosen to remain nameless: “We do not want the attention on us, but instead on the women and stories shared.”
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At the time of writing, the creators had received over 70 submissions, both anonymous and identified, with captions detailing each woman’s relationship to her stretch marks. One poignant caption featured on the Instagram account reads: “I have not (yet) birthed any children, but my body has changed and stretched causing me to have stretchmarks on various places of my body. They serve as a reminder of the years my legs carried me as I sprinted around the track, and the many times I tried to change myself to fit the mold of what society wanted me to look like. An estimated 80 percent of people have stretchmarks, which are often caused by rapid growth, weight changes or hormonal changes. Pregnancy is often the biggest cause -- leaving moms with “tiger stripes”—but men aren’t unaffected by stretch marks and women who haven’t had children get them too. And they seem to be having an impact. So far, Love Your Lines has united women from a variety of experiences—not just women who experienced stretch marks before and after pregnancy but also those who played sports, fought off diseases or simply went through stages of puberty.
A deeply personal and on-going project to celebrate our planet’s astounding diversity and beauty through portraits of women from every country and culture on Earth.
Atlas of Beauty
Im Magazine//November Issue
“Beauty is diversity,” says photographer Mihaela Noroc, “and I travel the world to discover it.”
Campaign//Atlas of Beauty
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global trends encourage us to look and behave in the same way, and to conform to social norms, but I believe that we are all beautiful because we are different. When I photograph these women I chat with them a lot, and try to make them feel special, proud and unique. I can get by in five languages and this helps, however in some countries, talking becomes body language. Sometimes I only have 30 seconds to make a portrait after a chance meeting with an
I’m a 29-year-old photographer and young woman from Romania who quit her boring job and started a new life. Two years ago I took my backpack and my camera — supported only by a small amount of savings I had worked hard to accumulate and small contributions from my followers — and began to travel all around the globe. On this journey I photographed hundreds of women immersed in their culture. Traveling on a very low budget around thirty-seven countries I captured beauty in Brazilian favelas, in the rough neighborhoods of Colombia, in an Iranian mosque, on the Tibetan Plateau, in the biggest Buddhist temple of Myanmar, and in the Amazon Rainforest, but I also got to photographed women in fancy areas of Oxford in England, in downtown New York, and in the suburbs of Sydney. During this project, I tried to photograph natural faces, without too much make-up, so that I might capture that moment of sincerity and serenity that is so specific to women today,
I’m inspired to photograph women from every different country, to show that beauty is everywhere. interesting woman on the street. While on other occasions, I might spend at least an hour photographing, if I have found her through social media the day before. Some days during my two-year journey I experienced dangerous moments or had worked long hours in difficult places, other days I followed exhausting routes or suffered from unfriendly viruses, but I know with all my heart, that I would do it again, and with all my passion. From the freezing, chaffing Tibetan Plateau near the Himalayas to the sultry tropics of South America, Noroc, 29, entitled her startling, revealing, and haunting project, ‘The Atlas of Beauty.’
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At times spending only 30 seconds with each subject and traveling only with her camera and a backpack, Noroc tried to take pictures of young women all in their twenties. She explained in a statement to Daily Mail Online ‘I’m a [29-year-old] female photographer from Romania that quit her boring job and started a new life. Two years ago I took my backpack, my camera and began to travel all around the globe, with savings made in years of working. ‘In this journey I got to photograph hundreds of natural women surrounded by their culture. My project is called ‘The Atlas Of Beauty’ and is about our planet’s diversity shown through portraits of women.’ She also came up with the concept during a journey to Ethiopia. This country showed fascinating women keeping their traditions alive without paying much attention to global trends. “I did realize that beauty is about being different, yourself and keeping your cultural heritage.” At times spending only 30 seconds with each subject and traveling only with her camera and a backpack, Noroc tried to take pictures of young women all in their twenties. She explained in a statement to Daily Mail Online ‘I’m a [29-year-old] female photographer from Romania that quit her boring job and started a new life. Two years ago I took my backpack, camera and begun to travel around the globe.
Campaign//Atlas of Beauty
Spending a limited amount of time taught me many things about different cultures or races. Art surrounds us most of the time, we’re just too busy to notice. It’s only when somebody with an extraordinary eye lifts up a detail of quotidian life, redacts it, and gives it back to us that we recognize it as art. Most often, that requires an expatriate reason either of the literal or the metaphorical sort—meaning, a detail-obsessed outsider—to bring the art already within our grasp to our notice. And so, the copiously-talented outsider Mihaela Noroc, 30, has undertaken a multi-year photographic project that she has boldly entitled The Atlas of Beauty, which accomplishes all and more of that. The rigors of the Atlas are important here: Noroc restricts herself entirely to portraits of women. The simple, tremendously elegant idea is to provide a map of the cultures of the world through their portraits. The first portfolio of this work is now complete, many of which are available in our gallery. Fourteen months,
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from August 2013 until November 2014, Noroc shot portraits of women in some 30 countries. She traveled overland from her native Bucharest up to the Arctic, thence through Russia and China to Japan.(She will be traveling later this year to the Balkans, the Middle East, East Africa, India, and to Tibet.) “I thought it was important to travel overland, not to fly,” Noroc, now back in Bucharest, disarmingly explains to Forbes. “You miss so much of the countries when you choose to fly.” Japan was not even her halfway point. Subsequently in the 2014, she hit Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, and then, as if that were not enough, working her way all through the Andean plateau, Chile, Colombia and Peru. The Atlas is a work in progress that Noroc is funding herself and via crowdsourcing, but it is a grand, cathedral-like construct, both architecturally—in the idea of mapping the world by its women.
100 women show photographer Liora K, and us what their bodies really look like. Women of all shapes, sizes, and colors shatter the media’s definition of beauty, and show us their glorious bodies!
Expose 2014
Im Magazine//November Issue
Only 5 percent of women have the type of body we see on billboards and in TV commercials. The “Expose� project wants you to see the remaining 95 percent.
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"Tell me something,” writes Jes Baker, AKA The Militant Baker, on her website. “When was the last time you opened up your browser and saw a beautiful image of a body shape that looked just like yours?” Thanks to projects like the Instagram account Love Your Lines, it’s becoming more common—but we’ve still got a long way to go. With Baker and photographer Liora K on the job, though, we’re making huge strides in the right direction. Their latest project, “Expose: 2014,” showcases real women and real bodies—and it’s just what we need to keep breaking down boundaries. You might remember Baker and K as the team behind “Lustworthy,” a photo series shot in the style of a fragrance ad that challenges ideas of conventional attractiveness. “Expose 2014”
continues their work of striking down socially imposed beauty standards and celebrating bodies of all shapes and sizes. These images currently making the rounds are actually the second batch of photos in the series; the first round made its debut in the fall of 2013, at which time 68 gorgeous and diverse women plus Baker and K gathered together to pose for some of the most amazing photographs I’ve ever seen. This year, they topped their numbers with a whopping 96 participants, all of whom are different, and all of whom are truly beautiful. On her website, Baker writes of the project: “We all know that what we see in the media isn’t the whole story. It’s not representative of all of us. And because of what we see (or
Im Magazine//November Issue
Campaign//Expose 2014
rather DON’T see) we start to believe that we are the only one with our particular stretch marks. Our uneven boobs. Our scarred legs. Our asymmetrical nipples. Our belly shape. Our body hair. Our what-ever-it-is-that-youdon’t-see-on-display-any-where-else. Rarely do we see our beautiful and complex combination of body parts that makes us magnificent. “And when we feel alone in our body, we do feel as though we are not enough. When the truth is: we are more than enough. And we are not alone.” This, then is the point of “Expose” and of all other projects like it. As I noted earlier this week, all bodies are worthy of celebration. Photographs like these bring them to the fore and lets the confetti fly. This, I think, is what makes Baker and K’s work so effective: Their projects are both unapologetic and respectful, making their statements and encouraging discussion. There is no room for insults or for words meant purely to hurt; that’s not what it’s about. It’s about talking. Conversation. Asking questioning into why we feel the way we do—and what we can do to change it. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a part of the revolution.
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American Beauty A photo project recreating the iconic scene from American Beauty. This campaign aims to empower women of color, and embrace their curves.
A M E RI C A N B E A UT Y
Im Magazine//November Issue
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Photographer Carey Fruth thinks that all the women in her “American Beauty” image series are just that beautiful. Her series is inspired by a scene from 1999’s movie “American Beauty,” where Kevin Spacey’s character imagines his daughter’s friend – young, white, thin – laying naked surrounded by rose petals. Fruth wants to retake that quintessential male fantasy and use it to empower women of all colors, ages and sizes to be happy about their bodies. San Francisco-based photographer Carey Fruth has set out to redefine what ‘American beauty’ is with a photo series of the same name that has women of all body types posing in romantic beds of flower petals. Fruth was inspired by a racy scene from the 1999 movie of the same name in which Kevin Spacey fantasized about one of his daughter’s friends. “By stepping into a fantasy dream girl world and by letting go of that fear, they are freeing themselves up to direct that energy they once wasted on telling themselves that they weren’t good enough to elsewhere in their life,” Fruth told Huffpost. It’s always easy to point out your flaws—that scar that just won’t fade, your love handles, stretch marks, the list is endless. But the truth of the matter is, no one is perfect. No matter how air-brushed a model looks, at the end of the day, we all have our flaws, and we all have to live with. In a new campaign tagged “American Beauty” by photographer Carey Lynne Fruth, she captured 14 women of various shapes, ethnicities, ages
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The project makes a mockery of what we perceive as “beauty” in the media. In doing so, the photographer empowers women of color with real curves. and sizes to prove that there is beauty in every scar, fold, mark and inch of your body. The photo series was inspired by the 1999 film– American Beauty which stars Kevin Spacey. In the movie he conjures up the perfect women —a teen blonde girl who in a particular scene is laying on a bed of roses. The campaign is set to show that so matter what size, shape or colour you are, you cab be your perfect woman and feel happy in your own body. Is there an ideal American beauty? Does that iconic rose petal scene in the film come to mind? It’s a compelling argument—a young, skinny, blond woman suggestively lying atop a bed of rose petals, her intimate parts strategically obscured by more red petals. In a new campaign tagged “American Beauty” by photographer Carey Lynne Fruth, she captured 14 women of various shapes, ethnicities, ages and sizes to prove that there is beauty in every scar, fold, mark and inch of your body. This is the most important message.
This photo series is an important step towards empowering women of color. The women are made to lie on a bed of rose petals recreating the iconic scene from the movie “American Beauty.” Inspired by one of the scenes in the movie American Beauty where a middle aged man is fantasizing about a teenage girl, she decides to take the power back from this perfect girl and to give it to women out there, that are as beautiful but not perceived as such by our society. The models posing sensually are all volunteers, acquaintances to the photographer. They come from different backgrounds, ethnicities, have different body shapes, ages. The girls are not directed during the shoot, they are just told to be themselves. The result are these beautiful women revealing their femininity, authenticity and vulnerability.
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