Making faces
I have just spent the most glorious weekend surrounded by family and friends to celebrate my eldest son’s wedding. For an occasion such as this, everybody does their utmost to look their best. It recognizes the gravity of the occasion, and also conveys to the couple the love and esteem in which they are held. Outfits, haircuts, shoes, make-up and ‘grooming’ are all an act of love.
What about when they become something else, though? What about when they become a chasing after an un-catchable wind? What about when they become a bid for some kind of manufactured and unattainable perfection? Journalist Esther Honig has been conducting her own particular brand of research on this. Recognizing the power of Photoshop to create impossible standards of beauty and perfection, she has sent her own image to people using the software in some 25 countries. The photo has come with the following instruction: ‘
With a cost ranging from five to thirty dollars, and the hope that each designer will pull from their personal and cultural constructs of beauty to enhance my unaltered image, all I request is that they ‘make me beautiful’.
Image: http://www.estherhonig.com/
Please visit the gallery to see how it grows here.
Honig is not criticizing the software nor those who make use of it. If anything, she is providing a shop window for those who use it. She leaves a question hanging in the air, though, about exactly what beauty is and how we see it.
At Saturday’s wedding ceremony I preached from the ancient book of Ecclesiastes, with its memorable phrase about God making ‘everything beautiful in its time’. Whilst the outward impressions of beauty in Honig’s experiment are unsurprisingly varied, I wonder what degree of similarity there is across cultures about the nature of inner beauty?
Perhaps this experiment needs a second string…