Have you ever thought about how we as a society have come to the conclusion that some things are beautiful and some things are just blatantly ugly? There must be some rhyme or reason to it, but it’s hard to place where exactly many of these popular opinions initially originated from. It’s important to challenge the pre-existing beliefs that we may take for granted and never question.
This series of photo collages (entitled "The Beauty of the Ugly") was also intended to be a challenge to myself to work with objectively ugly or undesirable building blocks and still create beautiful, attractive, and clever work. I wanted to step outside of my comfort zone, let loose, and be a little weird while also revisiting the formal elements of design.
After photographing over 1000 elements from grocery stores, dollar stores, antique shops, thrift shops, and malls, I had a lot of potential material to experiment with. My process involved a lot of trial and error, swapping different objects in and out, various compositional approaches, and a multitude of color and lighting adjustments. And slowly, I began to hone in on my final vision for this series.
I incorporated a lot of inspiration from Baroque and Victorian fashion as I constructed these portraits. The intent was also to integrate some references and nods to art history material as well, focusing primarily on female portraiture and workshopping titles for each collage based on existing famous works. Emphasizing the vintage nature of a lot of my photographed objects, I then chose to select a vintage grain filter to apply to each finalized collage to unite the many separate layers present. This also adds textural interest when these collages are shown at a large scale.
I feel that this work has merit as every step of the process was intentional and well-thought-out. This series of photo collages is undoubtedly quirky and odd, but it is original in the way that it challenges the concepts and attributes of beauty. While I acknowledge that my overall audience may have conflicting views about this work, I can only hope that some of you out there find it well-suited for your own personal expression.
