Melissa Faithful for Art-Sheep
Photographer Phillip Toledano‘s series A New Kind of Beauty is the story of people who have undergone many cosmetic surgeries.
These photographs are a combination of and a contradiction between the new and made up and the classical and eternal. Toledano’s models pose as if they are posing for a Renaissance painter, while their naked body showcases the alterations it has experienced. The classical notion of beauty is here perceived as the means to an end, something that needs to be achieved even through an obsessed and sick process. The way the modern body is being treated by the media, the society and the entertainment industries, is something extremely unfamiliar with the classical notions of virtue, pureness and welfare.
“I’m interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create it ourselves. Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make? (…) Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?” the photographer seems to wonder.
