Backstage at the Paul Smith Women show, London, September 2002. Photo by Felicia Webb. From the exhibition "Beauty CULTure."
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How do we define female beauty? The exhibition “Beauty CULTure,” which opens Saturday at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, examines some of the prevailing answers through a wide range of images, from portraits of celebrities who are worshiped for their looks to photos documenting a desperate need to conform to a perceived idea of perfection.
“Beauty CULTure,” on view through November 27, features a who’s who of photography—more than 100 photographers, including Gilles Bensimon, Albert Watson, Herb Ritts, Guy Bourdin, Matthew Rolston, Lillian Bassman, Mary Ellen Mark, Ellen von Unwerth, Nino Munoz, and Lauren Greenfield, whom the Annenberg commissioned to direct a documentary.
“One of the show’s highlights is a 30-minute documentary that will play every hour. It was directed by the photographer Lauren Greenfield, whose prints are also featured,” writes Simone S. Oliver in a New York Times feature on “Beauty CULTure.”
Lauren is one of the show’s four Featured Artists, alongside Albert Watson, Tyen, and Melvin Sokolsky. This marks the second time that this Featured Artist honor has been bestowed on her, the first being the Annenberg’s inaugural show, “L8S ANG3LES.”
“Ms. Greenfield has covered beauty-related subjects like aging throughout her career, mostly from a cultural perspective. During her research for the film, she said she learned to look at the subject from a biological standpoint with the help of Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, who is interviewed in the film. Dr. Etcoff wrote the book Survival of the Prettiest, an exploration of the biological relationship people have with beauty. Ms. Greenfield said her dialogue with Dr. Etcoff ‘gave me perspective when shooting things like eating disorders, plastic surgery, fashion.’”
The Times‘ Lens blog is featuring a slideshow of images from the exhibition:
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Click image to access slideshow.
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“As much as beauty can astonish and inspire, it can also corrupt and subvert, rendering all else—and even itself—broken and obsolete,” Wallis Annenberg, chairman of the board, president and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation, said in the exhibition’s press release. “The great contemporary photographers do so much more than chronicle and celebrate what is beautiful in our time. They dig beneath it, they confront our compulsion with it, and they turn art’s mirror on ourselves as well.”
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