Our Scars Make Us Beautiful

“To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.” ― Criss Jami.

Vulnerability is a force to be reckoned with. It eats someone alive and becomes a part of them forever. It also can express the greatest accomplishments in their life, the ability to overcome it. The intention of my work is to show the beauty that can be found in a place that seems so dark and disturbing that no hope can be found, to reawaken our view of being broken. That indeed or weakness is our strength.

This topic has always hit close to home with me. I suffered with anorexia for years when I was a teenager and it was the darkest I can remember time being. I felt insufficient in my life, and let what others said to me about my appearance or my statue define who I was. I let the demons in and control me, eventually trying to take my life away. When I finally broke free, I realized how strong I became through the process. That moment was when I decided that I controlled my life, not the world around me.

Even though I was able to find my way out of the dark, many are still where I once was. We live in a society where the media stresses what beautiful is and how you have to be that image to feel like you are worth something. I want to counter against that, I want to show the world that your imperfections are beautiful. Every roll, every scar, every aspect that someone is ashamed of is actually their strength. That there isn't a cookie cut version of what is acceptable, each one of us already is.

Each of my models have a broken past, they each have battled and conquered the darkness that once ate them alive. Their emotions and strength is what I want to come across, so I choose to photograph them. That way it is the pure emotion expressed right then and there and not a recreation that I recreated with a pencil and paint. Each photograph is cropped and placed next to another, creating the illusion that there is one person broken into many pieces. This is representational for broken beauty, how each one of us has been broken, but together we come together as a whole.

This piece is meant to make you think, make you wonder, and explore your inner strength. To inspire each of us to face our vulnerabilities and to motivate us to take them down. To rise up against the pressures we face, and recognize that indeed, we are all beautiful.