Nicole Fluter Senior Year '12

I had so much fun on this photo session! Nicole was a natural in front of the camera, and her smile lit the whole picture up! 

Mickayla Phillis Senior Year

I had such a fun time taking photos of my long time friend, Mickayla Phillis a couple weeks ago! It was so fun to catch up and such an honor to get to capture her senior year!

Thurman Family

Maternity Jennifer

A while ago I had the privilege to join Katie Campbell and several other amazing and talented photographers in a shoot designed to bless some beautiful young mothers and mothers to be.  Here are some pictures of the first Session. 

The Plague They Called Beauty

The world’s opinion on beauty and fashion have  evolved over the years. Today, the idea of beauty and worth is determined by your waistline, height, the size of certain body parts and how much money you spend on clothes. Women have been known to suffer all kinds of pain and humiliation in order to be considered attractive. Corsets, implants, surgeries and botox, anything to be accepted; beauty is pain after all. Women are willing to jeopardize their lives because they see and hear everyday that thin is beautiful, that skeletal is success. “It's time that all women felt beautiful in their own skin”(Nadeau)

 In 2006, a popular television show, “Ugly Betty”, aired that threatened the way media had been perceiving pretty, and made it look petty. Instead of telling women who to be and how to act, it supported the unique quality each individual is born with. It seemed to scream to a world of insecure women that it is okay to be themselves, in fact, it is encouraged. The show stared the average Plain Jane, Betty Suarez, working in the midst of the fashion obsessed, Mode Magazine. She was hired as the assistant to the editor in chief, Daniel Meade, because she was not attractive enough to seduce him. As the show progressed, so did her role at Mode, advancing from assistant to junior editor, without resulting to any of the peer pressure her coworkers promoted. In each episode, as she was criticized for her weight, lack of fashion and even her racial background she earned the respect of almost every character on the show, not to mention the hearts of many viewers as well. Her character dared to be brave and stand up for a world of women, just like Betty, who were trapped in silence and humiliation because they didn’t meet the media’s standards of beauty.

The message didn’t end there, even their advertisements promoted the message of inner beauty. When Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising company in New Zealand, came up with an ad to promote the show by covering the posters in a mall with a large paper bag, revealing only the shows title, channel and air time, it not only sparked curiosity, but it also mirrored the moral behind the show itself (Duncan). It enticed viewers to look beyond the outside and see what’s inside. People who saw the ad had to truly look underneath a paper bag, in order to see the always smiling and encouraging face of Betty.

Around the same time “Ugly Betty” premiered, Dove started a campaign called “The Campaign for Real Beauty”. In 2011, they conducted a study to better understand how the media was influencing the world’s view on ugly and beautiful. “The study revealed that only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful, and that anxiety about looks begins at an early age. In a study of over 1,200 10-to-17-year-olds, a majority of girls, 72%, said they felt tremendous pressure to be beautiful. The study also found that only 11% of girls around the world feel comfortable using the word beautiful to describe their looks, showing that there is a universal increase in beauty pressure and a decrease in girls' confidence as they grow older” (Dove).  Another source stated that, “Women’s magazines are full of articles urging that if they can just lose those last twenty pounds, they’ll have it all—the perfect marriage, loving children, great sex, and a rewarding career” (media awareness).

I can relate to the desperate desire to be accepted. Since the day I was given them, my scars have made me feel  insecure, especially when I see and hear that the world calls it ugly. The media encourages surgery to cover it up, to erase the marks that make me different, in order to morph me into a plastic clone of the airbrushed images on magazines. I know what it’s like to skip meals in hopes that I can fill the fatal demands of the media. I know what it is like to feel so numb and worthless that I felt the need to drag a razor blade across my flesh and release the faceless pain that was consuming me, telling me I would never be good enough, that I would never be loved. The beauty promoted by the world is brainwashing society.  A quote by America Ferrara, the actress who plays Betty, perfectly describes the hope a show like “Ugly Betty” can bring to me, and a million more girls like me; “It's so reassuring to have a woman heroine who triumphs with more than just what she has on the outside... who has more to offer the world than just a pretty picture. To me, the tragedy about this whole image-obsessed society is that young girls get so caught up in just achieving that they forget to realize that they have so much more to offer the world” (Ferrera). 

 

    The world’s view on beauty has changed over the years, but that doesn’t mean it cannot change again. The airing of “Ugly Betty” spread a message that planted a seed hope  to a thousand broken, insecure hearts long after the final episode aired. It told girls that there is more to them then appearance, and that if they just stay themselves, the opportunities are endless. Life is so much more then only skin deep. We are given hopes, dreams, and a desire to do something great. If we continue to get caught up in appearance and bettering the shell the soul is wrapped in, we forget that “You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body” (Lewis). The writers and producers  of “Ugly Betty” took a risk when they aired the show, and I believe the risk was worth it. They ventured to show the world that inner beauty is still the best kind of beauty, and that there is more to a woman then her face.


                                                   
                                            

Here are the pictures from the second session (:

Who Died and Made you King?

“There’s a girl on the streets with her hands in her pockets and tear stains on her cheeks, but no one stopped to help her up when she was falling. So wrapped up in their own prison were they, looking for any cracks. She walked past, a ghost of her formal self, a wisp of smoke with a tied on mask and a forced smile. She spent her days building walls for others to tear down. Don’t you know that walls aren’t bridges? The voices of other kids taunt her, planting weeds in her heart. The mean things said by kids more insecure then her, have choked the life out of her tiny frame. They could one day help tie the noose.”

Something I hate more then most anything is judgment. What’s worst is that it’s the one thing I cannot seem to break free from. I am guilty of this thing that tears me up inside. The statement, “I hope they get what they deserve,” seems so shallow to me. I mean don’t we deserve death? Don’t we all deserve the pain we face daily? Don’t we all deserve the demons that plague us? Yet we want others to be sympathetic to our pain and condemn those who are different from us. So what we really mean to say is, “I hope they get what I deserve.”

When I think about it in this way it really makes me stop. I try so hard to hide myself behind my mask and make sure no one else ever finds out how horrible I am, yet I throw out things like the sayings above. When someone is having the worst day of their lives, I turn to my friend and say, “They are just getting what they deserve.” This seems so bizarre to me. Who could wish their own punishment on someone else? The answer is, I do. The answer is, you do too.

Another thing about judging people that absolutely blows my mind is commenting on someones appearance. Who made me the judge of beauty? Think about it this way, you had too cookies and one looks to the other and goes, ‘I taste better’. They were both made by the same person, and cooked in the same oven at the same time. So it’s really not a true statement. Not only that but the cookie would have had to eat a bit of the other cookie, rendering it a cannibalistic snack, which is just gross.

God is the perfect creator. He is the inventor of beauty. So when you look at someone and whisper those thoughts in your head you are criticizing something that God made. The same thing goes for thinking the other person is better then you. Who gave you the right to put yourself more beautiful or more ugly then something created. Your equal. Different people, but equal in God’s eyes.

So I come to tell you I struggle with judging other people in both a high and a low light. I either make myself a god in comparison, or make them a god in another. This isn’t my job. These people around the world are God’s creations. A writer named Chad Eastman once wrote that the way we live is like a bunch of people holding mirrors in front of their faces. Looking at your life in that mirror head on is scary cause you can see all you have done. But nobody else can see into your mirror the way you do, and visa-verse. Not only is walking with your head sideways dangerous, but it won’t get you anywhere.

But how do we stop ourselves from entertaining these thoughts? By holding every single one of them captive. When you have a negative thought pop in your head, address it directly. Identify the lie it holds and then pray it away. This is easier said then done, believe me I would know, but it is guaranteed to work. My personal challenge this week is to not judge. I’ll let you know how it goes (: