Beauty

I'm currently exploring the idea of 'beauty' for my photography folio this Semester. I intend to create a folio of nudes and, whilst researching this topic, the question of what I, personally, find beautiful arose.

So I lay in bed, curtains drawn (coffee beside me) staring out into the backyard, listening to the birds, listening to the breeze swishing through the gum trees, looking at my unkempt backyard.....and I found myself thinking less and less of conventional definitions of beauty and leaning more towards the aethetic. The volunteers who are going to form part of my folio came into my mind - each and every one of them. A few have a traditional beauty about them but I started thinking more and more about the ones who didn't fit that category.....and I found them to have a radiant beauty about them.

Dissecting and analysing this feeling, I realised that what I found beautiful about them was more about how I felt in their company than about their physical attributes. It was more about my shared intimacies of laughter and tears with them. It was about their individual idiosyncrasies - their giddy-goatedness - their sense of mischief and fun - their insecurities, that made them so beautiful to me. Those things are not tangible.

I have a distant friend who has not volunteered for my folio (I wish she would) and yet, my thoughts keep drifting towards her on a daily basis. She is not 'traditionally' beautiful - certainly no size 6 or 8 girl - but there is a beaming radiance about her, her undeniable love and admiration for her husband, her friends, her family and, in particular, for her mother and her daughter - that I am like a moth to flame. I am drawn to her attitude mainly. She is larger than life but in such a gentle, non-evasive way that you can't help BUT feel good about yourself in her company. She makes you want to dance naked in the forest with a pair of butterfly wings clipped to your shoulders. Let's not get bogged down with the pragmatic details about this, okay?

Back to my folio, I reverted those thoughts to me. I am no oil painting - far from it. I am no size 6, 8, 10 or 12, for that matter. I am short and Rubinesque - I carry the war wounds of life on my skin - and yet, my husband thinks I'm beautiful (or whatever his definition of beauty is). Yet......internally, I see myself as I was when I was 18, 21, 28.....and it's this shell of a body which carries me through my life that doesn't adequately reflect the sensual, desirous, wholesome woman that exists beneath it.

I wondered if my nude models feel this way as well. Some of them have been "blessed" with bodies that DO mirror their internal attitudes. But some of them don't......and I am taking it upon myself to try and capture THAT essence, THAT beauty in a way that when they look at my images, they see what exists beneath.