How ironic. This is a fully public presentation, of free will.
Is it equally rude to draw attention to our personal angst?
I refuse to be manipulated into feeling guilty.
Wow. Fantastic creativity. Beautifully conceived and executed.
jbarber
04-May-2008 14:37
endlessly compelling issue. I like it when anyone raise these questions. to me, it revolves around our need or lack of need to conform to expectations about appearance. Do I want to be attractive? If so, the answer to the question "to whom?" becomes really important. Some people enjoy physicality and have a sense of self that accepts that we are living animals, and some people fear and hate this fact. Some people worry obsessively about appearance and this worry not only has no clear basis in their appeal to others, but seems also to diminish the acceptance and approval that they so desperately want. I often notice women (because I am a straight man), and also men, whose concern about appearance overshadows most other aspects of their essence. And some of them are already "handsome" or "pretty." They just were just genetically fortunate to inherit qualities that we now admire.
Then, I know people of both genders whose personalities are so engaged with the world or other people, and who simply accept their physical essence, that they are very attractive to me and to others in their wholeness, somehow, no matter how far they vary from some idealized notion of proportion, symetry, weight, whatever. They are just a lot bigger than their surface.
So these pictures are interesting. They assume that the viewer needs to rethink how he/she views the person holding the signs. They also suggest that the person holding the signs may want to deal with the same question, that is, how she views herself. I completely accept that when I look only at the surface of another person, I miss most of who that person is. But I look very intently at most people I spend any time with, because I want to absorb not just their surface but all the signs of personality that are expressed through expression: verbal, facial, gesture, stance, movement. But I'm a photographer with an interest in people, so I'm working on this train of thought all the time. I don't ever expect to "figure it out."
Good luck to the maker and subject of these imaged thoughts, if in fact, the maker and subject are different people....
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