Beauty Culture: Defining, Selling and Unmasking the Ideal
© 2002 Felicia Webb
Beauty: It’s a loaded word for most women, wrapped up in feelings of self-worth and self-improvement. It’s connected to social power and social pressure. It’s at the core of multi-billion dollar industries that promise, with the right products and procedures, beauty is within reach.
Beauty Culture, the exhibit running through November 27 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, deconstructs society’s complicated relationship with female beauty. Featuring works from more than 100 acclaimed beauty, fashion and fine art photographers like Herb Ritts and David LaChappelle, the exhibit explores how cultural ideals and expectations of beauty have evolved in the last two centuries. It illustrates the stunning power of the still image to shape how we see ourselves.
© 2009 Fadil Berisha
Both inspiring and disturbing, the nearly 200 photographs graphically explore our cult-like reverence and pursuit of beauty. They feature a wide spectrum of femininity, from Marilyn Monroe to toddler beauty queens to plastic surgery patients. They show how Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the modeling industry have shaped our current standard of beauty, giving birth to today’s beauty icons and often turning beautiful women into commodities.
The exhibit also unflinchingly challenges traditional notions of beauty defined by age, race, size and gender. A series of digital images show supermodel and modern-day goddess Gisele Bundchen transforming into an elderly woman. There are side-by-side images of Venus de Milo and Venus Williams. Familiar images of rail-thin models are juxtaposed with shots of voluptuous ones that rarely grace the pages of fashion magazines. There’s a gorgeous portrait of Michelle Pfeiffer…dressed as a man.
© Gilles Bensimon
In addition to the print gallery, Beauty Culture showcases hundreds of digital images on high-resolution screens in the interactive Digital Gallery. The Digital Gallery also includes a short documentary film by Lauren Greenfield. Featuring interviews with historians, beauty experts and photographers like Gilles Bensimon as well as models like Crystal Renn, it’s a fascinating guided tour through our cult of beauty. It also features real women talking about how they internalize idealized images of beauty—for better or worse. It also unmasks the industries that profit from women’s pursuit of beauty.
Most interesting is the exhibit’s focus on how technology in the form of digital retouching and surgical procedures has contributed to what one expert calls “the perfect storm of American vanity.” In keeping with that high-tech theme, visitors can alter a photo of themselves with the Beauty Culture Digital Salon, which allows users to choose between a Before or After image which they can then email or upload onto Facebook. Which would you choose?
© 1962 Terence Donovan
LOCATION
Annenberg Space for Photography
2000 Avenue of the Stars, #10
Los Angeles, CA 90067
AnnenbergSpaceForPhotography.org
HOURS
Wednesday-Sunday: 11am – 6pm
The exhibit runs through November 27.
Photographs in Beauty Culture include graphic images, such as explicit medical procedures and nudity, and may not be appropriate for all ages.
