How We See Beauty

It’s funny how I find myself on the weekends in the same place I find myself during the week: in front of my computer editing and thinking about film. 

I sent these photos to Sara after our shoot and it ignited a conversation regarding  how we were taught to see beauty and how that effects the way we see ourselves. We talked about skin care and the modeling industry and tape measures that have unrealistic sizes. We know the standards of the industry, the ways they are changing and we are hyper sensitive to all the ways it hasn’t budged, all the ways it’s stayed the same. 

Sara and I have Colorado roots. We share mutual friends and our paths seem to have been running parallel all these years but in the studio on this particular night, it felt like we have been working together all this time. In a way we have. We both have similar goals and aspirations: to push against an industry that is cruel, competitive and wasteful. It has created a disposable culture as it cycles out collections, people get used & abused then thrown away too. 

I sometimes wonder (actually, I wonder this often) why I continue to shoot even when I feel so many road blocks that aren’t just mental but that are ingrained in a system that doesn’t set up a large group for success, only a short few. Conversations and hang outs like these, even when no large company or corporate are behind it, feel the most natural to me and allow us the most freedom to show our world. 

Sitting with an old friend as we were collaborating on ideas for an upcoming project that would be the fuel for both our creativity, we mentioned how our biggest challenge is bringing the world we see and know, the one that lives in us, to the external world. I guess I’m still trying to figure out how to tell my story. We all are. 

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