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demi nues: beauty shades

"Age 20, my mother told me ‘you’re getting dark! Use this’, while she handed me a tub of CaroLight, a skin lightening cream". Colourism has always been an issue within many ethnic cultures, especially in respect of women, and during slave year’s workers with lighter skin received somewhat better treatment than their darker counterparts. Because of the preconceived views of beauty most races believe that to be beautiful or handsome one must have fair skin and a Western appearance. Consequently, sending many darker complexioned women as far as bleaching their skin and/ or undergoing surgery in the vain attempts to attain the attributes that a blinkered society has decided are the prerequisites of beauty. The project explores the many aspects of beauty in the female body, including texture and imperfections within the frame, focusing on the back as an open and untouched landscape canvas. The photographs observe the beauty of the female form whilst touching on the many connotations that have arisen from having coloured skin, such as ‘dirty’, ‘burnt’, and ‘smooth’ good and bad, as well as references to colonialist photography [full body shots] and many other embedded meanings in the series.

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