For my major art piece at school I explored fashion photography, with a focus
on feminism and sub-focus on strangers and teenagerhood. I approached three
very different girls in the year below me that I had never met before that had
original fashion tastes, and most importantly did not fall into the stereotypes
set by society of being beautiful. Instead of picking someone I knew to
model for me, I also wanted to experiment with the relation between a group of strangers.
This project was all about pushing oneself out of one's comfort zone in order
to create art. For the shoot, I asked the girls to chose outfits that they felt
beautiful in but that were different, sometimes even seen as "un-cool"
by society.
The girls had very different hair, skin and body types but all three of them
looked very self-assured in the shoots, reinforcing the theme I chose to convey
through my pictures. I really
like the fact that the pictures I took are very moody and depict adolescence as
a super complicated yet quirky ride.
Through the couple of hours of shooting, I became to understand the
girls' tastes and personality. I uncovered something that I find very rarely in
fashion photography, but that is reflected in all of the artists' work that has
inspired me: a piece of authenticity. As well as this, through this project I have been able to understand
that feminism is not about killing every man in sight or wearing no bra, it's about
women expressing themselves. And that's exactly what I was able to do.
