Passionate about the arts and creating work that explores national conversations, Kitty (L6) discusses the photographic concepts that kept her captivated in Lower Sixth. In September, she will begin her last year at Sherborne Girls, finishing studies in Photography, Economics and Psychology.
Last year my Photography A Level focused on female objectification and the widespread issue that it has become in the media and our everyday lives. I researched the power that makeup has on women and why typically wearing makeup increases our perception of beauty. We have been conditioned to believe that applying makeup will elevate our attractiveness and femininity compared to the natural look.
Popular culture has made us believe that women who take an interest in their appearance will be treated differently. We are constantly presented with images of what we are supposed to look like and would find it difficult to find any woman on an advertisement, tv show or film who isn’t wearing makeup. The Guardian quoted: ‘According to a 2011 study by researchers from Boston University and Harvard Medical School, women who wear a ‘professional’ amount of makeup in the office are seen as more competent, capable, reliable, and amiable than women who sport a bareface’. I wanted to find out why this message exists and highlight the experience of being a female in a sociocultural context that repeatedly encourages women to conform to beauty standards.
I explored this in my final project where I applied makeup to only one side of the models face. I wanted to represent the irony of beauty standards and the pressures on women to wear makeup, but not too much. Using split lighting, I was able to demonstrate how natural beauty gets repressed into the shadows. This lighting set up was achieved by placing a light source perpendicular to the subject to highlight one side, creating a dramatic contrast.
I was inspired by Maxim Vakhovskiy who focuses on the ‘whispering beauty of her subjects’. Inspired by raw beauty, Maxim uses her photography to celebrate womanhood and the human body in its natural form. This was something that I wanted to honour in my own work whilst comparatively using the objectification techniques presented by Ellen Von Unwerth and Helmut Newton to reflect the disjointed messaging of beauty in the media and society.
