8 Amazing Photos Of The Week: Beauty Among Us

Last week, I had the privilege of listening to a former portrait client speak to a roomful of people about her struggle with and triumph over anorexia.


She is 21 years old, and I photographed her and her twin brother the year they graduated from high school in Singapore. I had never photographed a grade 12 beauty quite like her before: she was the very embodiment of every feature that girls in the West are indoctrinated to believe is external beauty: very thin, long blond perfectly coiffed hair, immaculately applied makeup, stunning clothes, tall, heels, dazzling smile, etc. At the time, no one knew she was battling anorexia. I recall feeling empathy for her brother, assuming that he had spent a lifetime living in the shadow of this perfection.

Her freshman year at university, her weight plummeted to 72 pounds – about 33 kilos. My 10-year-old daughter weighs more than that. Needless to say, she nearly died and will have lasting health issues from the near total starvation of her body. Her psychosis was rooted in control and abandonment: her master – what she calls her ‘monster’ – the relentless and unattainable mirage of perfect beauty.

We know that true beauty is not external, yet we don’t really believe it. Today’s photos celebrate external packaging of a more inclusive nature: beauty in diversity, in the wondrous skins and body machines of everyday people.


Photo by Victoria Janashvili of Model

Denise Bidot


Published in

Aplus


Photo posted by

Jillian Mercado on Instagram


Photo by inottawa  


Photo by

Winnie Harlow posted on Instagram

Photo by Lee Jeffries

You’ve heard it before, beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and cannot be truly defined. These photographs are testament to that. You too, are beautiful.

Visit Martha Chaudhry Photography page to find out more about Martha’s work.




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Martha Chaudhry

Martha’s portrait photographs and family art commissions have won accolades and multiple awards. Twenty years a commercial photographer in the Asia Pacific, her contemporary approach to business and family photography is rooted in storytelling and sought by clients throughout the region. As an artist, Martha’s raw material is mined from the existing global archive of images. Her most recent work explores the 1896 early photographs that illustrate the first edition of the International Cloud Atlas. Martha combines her skills in photography and fine art practice to create custom works of family fine art for clients incorporating their own photographic archives meaninfully into the work. Beyond family portraiture, these pieces interweave the journeys and vital stories of families or business entities, resulting in showpieces of deeply meaningful and personal nature. On these commissioned works, Martha collaborates with others in the creative industry on design and installation, to ensure a gallery-worthy art piece that assumes pride of place in a home or office. Martha holds a Master of Fine Arts (MAFA) from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (Goldsmith’s London), holds licentiate qualifications with the Master Photographer’s Association (MPA) in the U.K., and trained as a photographer in the US, UK, Canada, Spain and Singapore. Her studio Martha Chaudhry Photography was founded in 1997. Martha has participated in many group exhibitions in Singapore, China and Hong Kong over the past twenty years. Martha believes her talents and work can be harnessed to assist others, and bring awareness to issues of social justice. Over the years she has used her professional skills to accomplish deep work in Cambodia in particular, as well as Singapore and Pakistan. In 2011 Martha was featured in Channel NewsAsia’s documentary series Asia Exposed 2, where her portrait and storytelling skills were employed to draw attention to the travesty of child sex trafficking in southeast Asia.

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