art project: fashion photography with strangers

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.