If truth is beauty, these people are ugly. Although a horrible thing to say, the inverse idea is that falsity is ugly and the subjects of photographer Phillip Toledano have denied the natural truth of their birth by re-creating themselves through plastic surgery. They have created now false selves in order, I assume, to be more attractive to themselves and/or to others, but to my eye they have become icons of artifice.
My parents changed my name when I was adopted—all my names—and I moved from the culture of my birth to be raised in English culture. I have read a lot about transexuals who so often describe themselves as “a man in a woman’s body” of vice versa. I identify with them in a way because I feel DEEPLY like a Francophone in an Anglophone body.
All my life, I felt like an outsider. When I was 45 years old, I discovered what all my dreams and so very many things I could not explain in my psyche and life were about because I found my birth mother. At that time, I wanted to change my name back to what it had once been. I wanted to re-capture and life the rest of my life in the culture of my birth. But I didn’t. In the end, I accepted that I am who I am, and changing my name wasn’t going to “solve” or fundamentally change anything. So to me, plastic surgery is a false route to acceptance of self. I can’t help feeling this way.
Philip Toledano’s formal portraits are eerily similar. It suggests that Angelina Joli has spawned a growth industry in lip augmentation. The portraits are hauntingly beautiful in spite of the grotesquerie of the surgery. See for yourself here. Click on “A new Kind of Beauty” to see the series of post-surgery portraits.
Thanks to Boing Boing.
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