Laetitia.Kamayi

Exposure: The Oxfam Photography Prize for Women 2013

Photos shot on Canon AE-1 35mm in Kinshasa, D.R. Congo

People make the world go round. All folks I've met, whether long term or briefly in my life so far. Every image has been shot on film either medium format or 35mm.

"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.

Working investigation on the uses and language of identity through portraiture in an attempt to go beyond the face. By layering together photos that best describe the other, and us is a truer definition of the self achieved or have we become more ambiguous? What language and discourse has developed through working in collaboration at great distances? Virtual realities has allowed for people to develop and create different forms of identity, by using email and facebook as forms of communication, we have explored the notion of the identity and representation of the self through the other.