Here we are featuring another post from contributor Wayne Ford, taken from his excellent and ‘must-bookmark’ posterous blog. In this post Wayne looks at Phillip Toledano’s body of work A New Kind of Beauty, :
Above Yvette. (©Phillip Toledano/Courtesy of Dewi Lewis).
I am interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create ourselves, says New York based photographer Phillip Toledano, who suggests ‘we are at the vanguard of a period of human induced evolution,’ in A New Kind of Beauty, ‘A turning point in history where we are beginning to define not only our own concept of beauty, but of physicality itself.’
For Toledano, beauty has always been a a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, he asks ‘What choices do we make? Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By History? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand? When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity?
Above Zander. (©Phillip Toledano/Courtesy of Dewi Lewis).
This striking series of portraits of people who have transformed themselves, even recreated themselves, is neither judgmental nor objective, in fact as W. M. Hunt points out, ‘These images are remarkably straightforward. The backgrounds are dark, the lighting plays on the skin in a classic chiaroscuro fashion; they have a handsome peachy glow. The sitters, naked or semi-clothed, look out benignly at the viewer. But the impact of these faces and the bodies is jarring, even, alienating. The sitters’ motivations for these enormous changes are undoubtedly personal and deeply felt, but the enormity of that transgressive action challenges us as the viewer to sort out our own ideas about beauty and gender.’
Above Angel. (©Phillip Toledano/Courtesy of Dewi Lewis).
They say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but for those that Toledano depicts in A New Kind of Beauty, one would suggest beauty is in the eye of the beheld. ‘Looking at these works — the photographs and the people — is an uncomfortable exercise for many of us — maybe not all — struck and staggered by the strangeness of this beauty,’ writes Hunt.
These men and women rarely undergo just one cosmetic procedure, but submit to multiple surgeries, cosmetic adjustments and aggressive hormone treatments, over a prolonged period of time. ‘Looking at these images, we have to question how our aesthetic judgments are compromised by our guardedness or discomfort with these seeming distortions, these new proportions,’ writes Hunt, ‘this is different and unfamiliar territory, and that makes us resistant or, after a couple of deep breaths, tentative.’
A New Kind of Beauty, is published by Dewi Lewis.
- Wayne
[...] featured 2 posts from Contributor Wayne Ford, the first looking at photographer Paolo Roversi, and the second, Philip Toledano. Below are a few more posts that#picbod students would do well to pore over, click on the image to [...]