DAMAGING BEAUTY Kristen Mizia
Introduction As I was getting ready for a night out with my friends, I came to the realization how many times I heard the same basic question be asked over and over again. “Does this look pretty?” “Is this cute?” “Do you think this makes me look good?” “Do I look fat in this?” I started to think about why these questions were being asked. Why did we care so much about what we looked like so much as to go to great lengths to look pretty. Images of the glossy magazines ran through my mind. “Wear this to look hot” “Top 10 beauty products” “Clothing styles to get the perfect man”. What gave these magazines the right to say what was beautiful? With their millions of readers, it was a scary thought that so many young women were believing what they deemed beautiful. The idea of beauty and what is considered beautiful has existed in our culture since the beginning of time. The standards have changed, but the effects have still remained. These so-‐called beauty standards were infecting the confidence of women. And I had a first-‐hand experience. Every day, women are putting themselves through torture-‐like routines to achieve what the media thinks is beautiful. To me, the most detrimental effect of these routines is how women felt before they used beauty products. Almost every single woman I asked saw herself in a negative light when they were completely free of make-‐up. The images within this photo essay include phrases. These phrases represent how real women feel before using their beauty products. The phrases were collected from a handful of women that I asked. The images are completely black and white, except for the single phrase colored in pink. The locations of the photographs are in the natural setting of where the beauty routines take place.
Photo Essay Analysis The medium I used to capture the images in my photo essay was an iPhone 6 camera. I chose this over my digital camera not only because of ease, but also because it actually had a clearer image and stronger flash than my camera did. The only downside of using my iPhone was that the images were generally much smaller than a digital camera would produce. In addition to taking the images on my phone, I also used an application that allowed me to alter the images. The application allowed me to filter the image into black and white only and then re-‐color certain parts of the image to make it appear pink. The purpose of this was to make the word or object that was colored pink to stand out against the black and white. In addition, I felt as though the black and white made the image appear as a more serious topic, as it should be construed.
The images I chose to include were all staged, meaning that I deliberately posed each object within the picture.
Furthermore, there is a specific reason for how each object is placed. This makes it very different from some of the perspectives on photography that we have reviewed. Sontag states that photographs are “miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (Sontag 2). The fact is, that these images are not going to be seen by just anyone, they are deliberate and altered to be unique. They are not just evidence, but rather a work of art.
My photo essay more resembles the opinions of Weston in his article, “Seeing Photographically”. He explains that
learning to see photographically is much more complex than just pointing and shooting. “By varying the position of his camera,
his camera angle, or the focal length of his lens, the photographer can achieve an infinite number of varied compositions with a single, stationary subject” (Weston 173). Like I mentioned before, each aspect of my photographs were staged and created for a reason. The images I chose to include in my photo essay have varied angles. In some of the pictures, it appears that I am looking in on a women going through her beauty routine to show the lengths she takes to appear beautiful. In other pictures, the subject is faced head on in the frame to create a more dramatic look and to put the focus on the colored word.
My main purpose that I had in mind while shooting and choosing these photographs to be included was to create a
social photo-‐essay. Quoting John Berger in Ritichin’s article, “The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory” (Ritichin 7). By staging photographs for my essay, I displayed a social issue. Although Ritichin is discussing social photographs that are not necessarily staged like mine, they still have the same effect: to get people to think about something after the photograph is shown. The end goal is to have my viewers understand the destruction beauty standards cause through the use of the composition of my photos.
Photo Analysis
One of my favorite images that I photographed was of my little sister putting on high heels in a bathroom. High heels
are a common symbol of female beauty pain. Although heels are painful and unnatural, women suffer through wearing them to achieve the standard of beauty that the media tells us is attractive. The fact is that women can be attractive without the need for heels and should see themselves as beautiful in any circumstance. This picture contains no word or object colored in pink, but instead compositional features to make the image interesting to the eye.
A compositional feature used in this image is the rule of thirds. My sister is positioned in the first two thirds of the
image rather than completely in the center. Aesthetically, the image is interesting to the eye. The rule of thirds creates this because naturally, an eye is drawn to two-‐thirds up the page.
Another feature is the viewpoint at which the photo was taken. The photo was taken from the ground with the camera
faced upward towards the subject. This suggests two things. The first thing being that since it is shot from the ground, the image is focused mainly on the bottom half of the subject. This was done intentionally so that viewers would realize the point of the image is that heels are a beauty standard that exists today. The second thing this viewpoint suggests is mystery. Such as Berger said, “photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation” (Berger 292). The view is into a personal routine, one that is not usually seen by others. The photograph captures a woman choosing to put on heels to make
herself seem beautiful. The subject is not looking directly at the camera to make it appear she did not know she was being photographed, when in fact the photograph was completely staged.
Although composition is not everything in a photograph, it adds a certain level of interest and pleasure for the eye of
the viewer. It was fun to experiment with the different types of composition after learning about them and effectively use them within a photograph.
Works Cited Berger, John, and Geoff Dyer. Understanding a Photograph. N.p.,1976. Print. Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print Sontag, Susan. “Photography.” New York Review of Books 18 October 1973: n. pag. New York Review of Books. NYREV. Web. 17 December 2015. Weston, Edward. “Seeing Photographically.” The Complete Photographer Vol. 9. No. 49 (1943): 168-‐175. Print.