Woman - your duty is beauty

Reflecting on the western norms that influenced my grandmother's view on beauty and the cliché notions that have been passed through my family for generations, my grandmother and I explore current female beauty standards through a series of staged images.

Since 2018, I have been collaborating with my grandmother on and off creating images that concern our female vanities and how these shape our identity as women in society. We call the series “Woman - your duty is beauty” named after a beauty guide book my grandmother purchased as a teenager. A book that she refers to as her "beauty bible.”

It is the few, if any, who will proudly stand by their own vanity. But it is always there, hidden, held down, fine-tuned, manipulated, for many different reasons – and sometimes for the better in all of us. And it can, I think, be extremely interesting to take a closer look at, to enlarge and highlight, to let loose. And whereas we – the young and the middle-aged – have all kinds of opportunities to shape and nurture our vain tendencies on social media channels, there is a generation whose vanities are rarely exposed nor demanded: the elderly.

One might say that Instagram and TikTok function as our generation's oversaturated "beauty bible" with an endless source of inspiration and ideals of beauty.