Needless to say, the picture you see above is truly striking. It struck me the moment I saw it. Maybe it is the way the 'marks' on their bodies appeared like art, almost like their stories were etched upon their very skin. It was simply beautiful. We should write a piece about this shot, I strived to understand the inherent motivation behind the picture. The talented photographer Ron G.Shiri had tagged it "banded beauty". I had never heard of that before. ‘Whatever could that mean, I thought. So of course, as any normal person would, I went ahead and typed “banded” into my trusted google search. We all know Google never lies. In the definitions provided, the word that resounded the most was "marked". Banded meant something that was marked with bands or strips of another thing with a different color/texture. But more than that, being banded means that you are identified with that thing. Now I could see more clearly what the photographer's point was. But of course, since art is subjective, I can only share what banded beauty means to me, in the context of this picture. I like to think that he(the photographer) didn't merely refer to the pigmentation of their skin as the marks, but how society has “defined and identified” what beauty is supposed to be. Has set the standards and ideal, so to speak. So that If you in some shape or form deviate from the standard, you are banded as "different", "weird" and sometimes even "ugly". A label has been put on what beauty is supposed to be, and in this system, there is not much room for deviance. So you see, these beautiful persons that you see above, society would like for them to believe that their beauty is corrupted, it is marked with difference and scars and imperfections and flaws. That their beauty falls short of whole. When in fact, none of us can ever meet up with the unrealistic concocted ideal of beauty. NOT. EVEN. ONE

Okay, okay, you might be thinking "too deep". But is it? Why is it that we(in general) are so quick to downgrade someone's beauty if we feel it doesn't fit into a mold? Who made this mold? Why is there even a mold in the first place? We were all to be unique, so why are we even meant to conform to the same freaking standards of appearance. "She would’ve been attractive, but those fat thighs though". "If only she were lighter skin" "Eww did you see his nose” and so on and so on. But, don't you see, we all have flaws, imperfections, things about ourselves we are not necessarily so comfortable with now, heck, things that we are never going to be 100% comfortable with. We all don't fit into the mold in one way or the other. So why do we accept this unachievable mold in the first place??? (Does one anyone have an answer to this, I want to know) And more than that, why do we bring down one another when we don’t think we fit into these ideals?

(Guys, somewhere in between writing this article, I have become suddenly so passionate about this topic that I’ve found myself right now sitting here pounding away at my keys lol).

 

I'd be honest, it's pretty hard not to view beauty from very biased goggles, it’s hard not to see things from the myopic perspective of the cultural context we are within. It's pretty damn hard, and we can’t be perfect. We really can’t. But what we can do, is not just sit there and accept what they tell us- that beauty is in one shade, or one size or one skin tone, or one race, or one eye shape or one whatever. You cannot put a band to beauty and say "sorry if you're not wearing this, you don't belong. Okay bye-bye". We simply cannot. We are so much more than these labels.

I’m just going to end my little rant-article-thingy with this little piece I read from Ernest Hemmingway that honestly just resonates so well with what I’m trying to say.