From studying text by Mary Wollstonecraft, Kate Milett, Nastasha Walter, and Spare Rib amongst others the term ‘Pornography of Beauty’ kept reappearing. This term represents a visual culture that is strongly prejudice against women. Repressing them by taking their sexual bodily parts and distorting them, which intern leaves women with a deep sexual shame about their physical appearance due to not being able to conform and distort their appearance into what society and media would have us believe was the norm.
My final piece consists of five nude self-portraits of different scales, printed in the colour darkroom on matt paper, unframed. The faces were burnt out on the 5x4 negatives before printing. One of the many reason I chose to burn into my negatives was to depict how the female form, can either be fixed into an object of desire or destroyed and disregarded, be it from battery by a partner, mutation in hard-core porn, photo shopping in magazines or the knife of a plastic surgeon. The second reason was to show the distortion I have felt for my own body having suffered from body dysmorphia.
