She wakes up in the afternoon and puts on her suits from Dior, jacket from Alexander Wang, and high heels from Miu Miu. Then she goes out to a party. She drinks and flirts with different men, gossips with her friends about the new girl’s fake Valentino, and then goes back home not realizing it is already another day.
I listen while my friend is talking about her daily routine. I imagine this totally different life from mine and notice the emptiness and insecurities in her eyes.
People have always been putting certain expectations on girls like her. They gravitate to her because she is wealthy. Men pursue her because she is pretty. “But they don’t even care who I really am,” she said.
I pick up my camera and take pictures of her. She is attractive with makeup on and adorned with her favorite jewelry and clothes from different luxury stores. I photograph her face mostly out-of-focus. Who is she? Who does she want to be? How does she want people to see her? It is never about her face, her clothes, or her jewelry. She tells me about the softness in her heart calling out that she is lonely.
As a female, I often see on billboards and posters models wearing the finest makeup, posing perfect bodies, implying that there is a universal definition of beauty, or as I understand, a forgery of beauty. Just like the expectations people have put on her, this burden has been weighing heavily on women’s shoulders for too long. There is a feeling inside of me wanting to break this “forgery of beauty”, this prison of materialism and false assumptions of women. The strength in women is never about appearances. I hope one day she will find out what her true strength is.
Photos were shot using film camera MINOTA X700 with Fujicolor C200 film and digital camera FUJIFILM X100T.