Beauty

I can't pinpoint what it is about this photograph that is so captivating to me, but I've been sitting with it here on my desktop for over a week now, so I thought that with or without anything to say about it, it's worth sharing.

I found it while scanning the MoMA website. It's by American artist Lee Friedlander, who's known for photographing musicians, working poor, and sexual/erotic but none-glorified nudes.

This woman has a beautiful body. Not a perfect body, but a real body. A body that appears to have been taken care of lovingly - she hasn't under eaten, or over indulged, she hasn't been ravaged by painful beauty trends, but she also hasn't disregarded any aesthetic sensibility.

This photo is like the artsy version of the "Dove Campaign for Real Beauty." For those of you who don't know / remember, in 2004 Dove launched a campaign shot by Rankin, who I'll dub 'photographer of regular people,' intended to broaden the stereotypes of beauty by featuring regular women, (as apposed to professional models,) of various shapes, sizes, colors, and ages. The women in the advertisements were not thin, but they were also not unhealthily overweight. They were just regular women, doing what they could to feel good about themselves in a culture that is overly focused on body image. Simultaneously, Dove founded the "Self-Esteem Fund," which has positively effected millions of women and girls, through the programming and funding of self-esteem building workshops, which you can learn more about on their website.

Unrelated in terms of subject matter, but related by artist and medium, the photograph below is a more recently shot Friedlander work that has captured my mind.

I've always loved trees because in Jewish culture, and for that matter in many cultures, they symbolize life, hence the Tree of Life. Trees have this amazing capacity to be reborn each year, to start fresh each spring, proving their commitment to life; they become stronger and more beautiful despite having just endured another painful winter, another painful moment. They sprout branches and buds filled with fresh flowers and foliage, as if giving birth to new life which then floods the earth with a colorful petal and leaf shower, just as people conceive of ideas and send them into the world, creating and inspiring.

Incase the mere elegance of Friedlander's tree in not enough, he also captures the shadows it creates rather magnificently through his wide-angle lens, thus producing the illusion that the ground is not just grass covered soil, but rather the earth – round, full, and boundless.

While I was in Venice, I read Toni Morrison's Beloved, a painful story of a broken family doing the best they could despite the relentless hardships of slavery and the supposed freedom that should, but doesn't, come with being an emancipated slave. I highly recommend the book, if not simply for the heartbreaking, provocative story, also because Morrison is one of the most eloquent writers I have ever read – there’s something about her use of metaphors, creative and poetic metaphors… I brought that up because at one point in the novel she describes the shadows of the family holding hands. This idea, or metaphor, continues to captivate me because it expresses the notion that even when things aren’t perfect in reality, or they aren’t perfect right now, beauty, happiness can still be found – a piece of wisdom everyone can appreciate.

Morrison’s insight on shadows led me to do some research on the mysterious silhouettes. I found that in Jungian psychology, the shadow is a part of the mind filled with weaknesses and shortcomings, the types that we repress. Ugh, have shadows become my latest fascination as unconscious suggestion that I need to be doing a better job self-reflecting, self-critiquing? Do I need to become more self-aware? I don’t know if I can handle that!

So, Jungian shadow theories aside for now, here are a few of my own thoughts on the subject of shadows: perhaps they speak to a longing for insights about the past and the future as they fall behind us and then run ahead again; perhaps they remind us to seek meaning in that which is not perfectly clear, to accept that an outline is a good start; perhaps they serve as a metaphor for the connections between light and dark moments; or perhaps they are nothing more than a beautiful subject for a photograph.

1. Lee Friedlander, Nude, 1980. Gelatin silver print. MoMA, New York.
2. Lee Friedlander, Tarrytown, New York, 1992. Gelatin silver print. MoMA, New York.