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Picturing Terror Jo Broughton Muse Lilia Li-Mi-Yan Female Prison Bex Day The Eye of the Beholder Changing Faces Claudia Paterson

Femme Spotlight Alix Marie Bleu Juliana Kasumu Irun Kiko Claudia Paterson Changing Faces BEAUTY & LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE

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Ladybeard

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Beauty

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Irun Kiko

Juliana Kasumu

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Editors Kitty Drake, Madeleine Dunningan, Sadhbh O’Sullivan Art Direction and Design Peggy Lin Arts Editors Hannah Abel-Hirsch and Tyro Heath Commissioning Editor Sarah Roberts Cover and Lead Photography Anton Gottlob With thanks to Claudia Roycroft, Emily Friedman, Lydia Drake, Phoebe Braithwaite, Teresa O’Connell Published in 2018 by Ladybeard Ltd Printed by Park Communications This selection copyright © 2018 Ladybeard Ltd ISSN 2053- 4698 info@ladybeardmagazine.co.uk

Featuring Alex Paulus, Alix Marie, Amanda Bates, Adrea Bruce Illustration Albert Tercero, Billy Clark, Bronya Meredith Photography & Styling Alessia Vanini, Anton Gottiob, Anu Paavola, Bed Day Words Abdullah Ahmadi, Andrew Towers, Anita SenGupta

04 Spotlight Alex Paulus, Leah Edlman-Brier, Sessa Omoregie 10

Femme Four queer femmes on giving honour where there has been shame

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Irun Kiko Juliana Kasumu

20 Changing Faces Claudia Paterson 24 Picturing Terror War photographers on the tension between terror and beauty 28 The Eye of the Beholder Bex Day & Alessia Vanini 34 Bleu Alix Marie 36 ‘I will pay any money to suck your toes’ Sarah Roberts 40 Female Prison Lilia Li-Mi-Yan 42 Muse Jo Broughton

Spotlight

Alex Paulus

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Alex Paulus

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Living the Dream My series of distorted figures, Living the Dream, is a reflection on how, while people’s lives can be extremely difficult, they choose to ignore or deny this aspect. In other instances, people try to improve their situation by buying products that they think will improve their lives—but ultimately these attempts falls flat. I constantly think about things in my own life that aren’t working or are broken: I end up rigging these things to make them work temporarily, or I get so used to them being broken, that I don’t even notice anymore. I also like to include humour in my work and the titles. I hope my paintings give people a laugh while also helping people to think about how they spend their time on this planet.

Alex Paulus is originally from south east Missouri but lives in Memphis where he is an Assistant Professor at Southwest Tennessee Community College. His brightly-coloured paintings depict distorted characters on bizarre expeditions, in search of banal dreams and utopias. They have been shown in cities across the world, including Memphis, Nashville, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Aspen, and London. Paulus draws inspiration from the eccentric people and absurd events that he encounters daily. This unconventional work humorously reminds us not to take our hopes and dreams too seriously, while illustrating the beauty of such pursuits.

To see more from Alex visit alexanderpaulus.blogspot.com

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Spotlight

Leah Edelman-Brier

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Leah Edelman-Brier

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Leah Edelam-Brier is a visual artist who works primarily with photography. She reveived her B.F.A. from Rhode Island College and holds an M.F.A. in Art Photography from Syracuse University. Through her work she explores ideas around the female body, creating images that aim to disrupt traditional beauty ideals by exploring themes of desire, fertility, family, and metamorphosis.

Body Becoming My series, Body Becoming, aims to find beauty in what society would class as grotesque, while simultaneously questioning the resilience of the female body. The images explore the space between youth and decrepitude, confronting the universal fear of ageing and becoming one’s mother. Through the series, I intend to humanise the decay of ageing, encouraging viewers to recognise the beauty in both the elderly body and its youthful counterpart.

To see more from Leah visit leahedelmanbrier.com

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Spotlight

Sessa Omoregie

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Sessa Omoregie

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Camgirls

London-based digital artist, art director and copywriter Sessa Omoregie is fascinated with cyber culture and issues around femininity. Her work exists in the digital realm and she employs collaging and glitching techniques to investigate concepts of identity.

Camgirls is the interactive, collaborative digital art project for today’s Venus. Selfies replace female figures in iconic paintings from the history of art, reclaiming them from existing as subjects for the male gaze. The project has existed online for roughly five years, but has only found a home in recent months after floating between blogs, Facebook posts, unsourced re blogs, art websites and online discussions.

Camgirls continues as a web platform for women and non-binary people to create, discuss, and experiment with self-identity on the internet.

To see more from Sessa visit camgirls-project.com

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Femme

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELLEN PEARSON

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Femme

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We spoke to four queer femmes about giving honour where historically, there has been shame Femininity and the LGBTQ+ community have a complicated relationship. Much like the cis, straight world in which we live, the LGBTQ+ community (both subconsciously and explicitly) understands femininity as fundamentally less valuable than masculinity. Femininity is read as weakness, and, crucially, as a kind of superficiality: the feminine person cannot possibly be being themselves; they are putting on a performance for the straight, male gaze. One of the most significant consequences of this way of seeing is that it essentially invisibleness feminine queer women. If any woman who looks ‘womanly’ is just playing dress up for a man, gay women who look feminine-gay women like me—simply don’t exist.

Femme’—a lesbian sexual identity used by feminine bisexual and lesbian women to distinguish themselves from their butch/stud counterparts-developed in response to that invisibility. Rooted in lesbian working-class bar culture in the 1950s, ‘ femme became a way to actively assert your desire for women without having to compromise your femininity.

You could wear stereotypically feminine things (like dresses or lipstick) without being inauthentic, or in authentically gay.

The identity became a clear way to place your femininity as something that wasn’t in opposition to being a lesbian: it was in fact a key part of who you desired and who, in turn, desired you.

Societal and historic shifts in our understanding of gender and sexuality have broadened the meaning of ‘femme’ no longer the reserve of lesbian and bisexual women;it’s now a descriptor used by a range of LGBTQ+ people including trans women, non-binary people and gay meaning some ways, that is a testament to progress: a kind of lessening of the shame around femininity in queer circle sin reality, that conception of femininity as not being ‘querkening’ persists If you don’t explicitly present in a way that divorces you from straight, patriarchal standards. Your sexuality is somehow invalid. I have friends who’ve been called out for not wanting to cut their hair short I’ve been told that you’re not a ‘real lesbian’ if you have long nails. This hetero-patriarchal hangover is built into LGBTQ+ spaces—you see it in the Grindr profiles that read‘ no fats, no femmes; in the lesbians in gay bars who are dismissed as tag hags: in the trans women accused of‘ aping femininity.

To be femme, in some ways, is a radical act of reclamation It means standing in defiance of routine devaluation spoke to four very different femmes about what that feels like—the breadth of their answers gives a window into the complexity, and the power, of being LGBTQ+and feminine today.

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Irun Kiko Femme

Travis Alabanza I love bodycon dresses. My mum used to let me wear them when I was younger, but when I went through puberty I stopped feeling comfortable in them because of how they showed the bulge of my dick. I really wanted to tuck away my genitalia. Now I love nothing more than wearing a really tight bodycon dress and not tucking’ s my favorite silhouette.

Recently I’ve moved from just accepting bodies like my own to actively desiring them Now I’ll see a gender non-conforming person and find them beautiful and hot.

That is down to a huge change in how I view my own and other people’s femininity. I was always naturally a feminine person, but being coercively assigned maleate birth meant I was often punished for doing anything that was read or coded as feminine. I had this formula in my head that expressing that part of myself equaled pain or punishment. As I got older it meant danger too being trans is dangerous. Femme was a conscious and Intentional choice to reclaim what I’d been denied.

It took a long time for me to decide that it’s more dangerous not to be my authentic self. When finding my fame less, race was essential: I had to look outside the white image of femininity to understand who I was gender non-conforming people with third genders, non-gender description and feminine people existed for hundreds and hundreds of years prior to colonization. When I realized that it made me think of being visibly femme as a de colonial act—it’s about grounding myself In the fact that I exist, and people like me have always existed.

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Juliana FemmeKasumu

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Victoria Sin

Victoria Sin The femininity I perform onstage in drag is one that I would never be able to achieve in an everyday setting. Because I grew up in a mixed cultural household (my mum is white and my dad is Chinese), drag is a way for me to critique, and also live out, this glamorous white femininity that I was never able to attain.

The thing that has defined my drag character lately is my breasts. I remember hitting puberty and watching all the other girls starting to get curves and waiting for my turn, but it never came. When I put on my prosthetic breasts I know I have this incredible, bombastic figure changes the way I move. They make me feel sexy in every specific, feminine way, but at the same time very asexual. They feel like flesh but they’re not my flesh, they’re prosthetic to me. The impermanence is part of the appeal. I take my makeup off after each show with a face wipe and

photograph it. Each one acts as a relic of the transformation, and an archive of the femininity performed that evening. It becomes a performative image in and of itself, kind of like a moment of returning to myself. Whether I’m in or out of drag, both personas are a kind of performance—but I think about that moment of transformation imprinted on the face wipe as the most authentic moment. It exists in limbo between two acts. When I’m not in drag I still ID as a femme, but I don’t call myself a woman. Something that is at the heart of my practice is that femininity is not essentially tied to womanhood-they can have nothing to do with each other. I am very attached to my identity as a femme, but I resent people if I’m a woman. I think that comes from a lifetime of people putting femininity on me in ways that I didn’t appreciate or want.

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Sarah Moore

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I’ve been obsessed with Jessica Rabbit since I was a kid I love the combination of red hair and lipstick Red lipstick, specifically this liquid-to-matte one that I wear every day, was such a big part of constructing my identity. I remember watching this film noir called Double Indemnity—I loved the association made between women and lipstick Women applying red lipstick in film means that they’re ready for sex, in an incredibly empowered way. I reject that notion of I’m a femme lesbian because I am not a butch lesbian. It’s more like, ‘ I will wear lipstick and it’s not for you, and it’s going to piss you off because I’m queer It’s about using feminine tools in a deliberate and antagonistic way to make a point.

Finding myself as femme gave me the strength I needed to walk into the world as a queer person. My identity as femme is defiance and pride in the face of patriarchy and adversity. I used to be embarrassed that I felt like I didn’t fit anywhere;I can assimilate into the straight community easily and I’m not comfortable with that I don’t like when people think of ‘straight-passing’ as a compliment. When I took the time to learn what it would mean for me to be queer-to embody queer rather than present queer-it gave me the confidence to embrace vulnerability Now I understand my femininity as something soft but hard-core, strong and beautiful.

Juliana Kasumu

Chardine Taylor-Stone I went through a stage where I thought I was bisexual during that time I was very feminine while in relationships with cis guys. When I came out again as a lesbian I was tomboyish for a while because I felt in a strange way that I had to be.

Once I had discovered femme, I realized that he way I wanted to be naturally is what other people. specifically, butch women, desire. It was a revelation I can be as pink as I fucking want-someone loves that part of me.

My femininity is for me, but it’s also about how that plays out in my desire for butch women or trans guys. No cis men fantasy about butch / femme relationships, because to them it’s a threat. If you’re in that kind of relationship, you essentially replace any kind of male gaze by fulfilling all the gender and relationship roles yourselves. That’s why the patriarchy won’t allow femme lesbians to be visible—because we exist in antithesis to the male gaze. But if nobody sees me when I’m walking down the road, then they don’t see my story.

I do worry that we are losing our history.

I was recommended Joan Nestle’s work by an older femme friend and reading her book, The Persistent Desire: A Butch / Femme Reader (1992), was almost like discovering the bible. That books out of print now, like a lot of lesbian writing, which means we don’t pass down femmes origins in lesbian culture. Speak to most people and they think ‘femme’ is just a term used by gay men-the whole conversation around his identity is being led by the gay male experience actually had to rewrite the ‘femme’ Wikipedia page recently, because someone took it upon themselves to define ‘femme’ as an identity that only applies to transfeminine people. They’d completely erased lesbians from the history of the term.

Interviews by Sadhbh O’Sullivan Our subtitle is inspired by a Maggie Nelsons citation of an essay on butches and femmes in The Argonauts (2016 ) to be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.

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IRUN KIKO Juliana Ka 16

asumu

Juliana Kasumu

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My new penis was propped up at a 45-degree angle. I couldn’t sit, because of the two rows of large staples, which stretched like gory centipedes from the creases of my groin, underneath the lines of my buttocks to the outside of my upper thighs. My left forearm was wrapped in a layer of silicone mesh, flowed by a layer of gauze, followed by a layer of crepe bandage, all encased in a spongy protective sling and elevated by means of a spongy protective sling and elevated by means of a strap which hung from a tall metal stand beside the bed.

The flesh, nerves, and arteries that had once been part of my forearm were now nestled between my thighs, in the form of the carefully elevated, brand spanking new penis.

This procedure is called phalloplasty. The surgeon take skin graft from the forearm, thigh or abdomen and rolls it to create a phallus, with another roll of skin inside create a lengthened urethra. Here in the UK, there are usually three operations.

The first is to create the penis and urethra and hook up the nerves; the second is to hook up the water pipe, remove and close the vagina, perform a hysterectomy and create a male— like scrotum, and the is third is to implant silicone testicles in theocratism and, if desired, a device in the shaft that allows an erection for sexual intercourse. I opted for all apart from the erectile device, as it carries with it a high risk of infection. and I couldn’t bear the thought of re-exposing my finally healed penis to new perils.

I know you don’t need a penis to be a man. Many transmen are whole, happy and complete without one. But needed a penis. I needed it because it was part of me, underneath the false-feeling layer I wanted to peel back. When I dreamed, I had a penis. When I woke, it wasn’t another dream-like place in which I was less myself than my half remembered, whole, sleeping person. I knew the surgeries would be arduous, but I also knew I needed them to have any quality.

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I would sleep, I would dream, and I would wake up as myself remained bedridden for two days post-op Slipping in and out of consciousness, I had half-hallucinatory visions of gore. I thought I was in a public bathroom with Ted Danson. He’d torn a hole in his stomach and was eating his own intestines. At other points, I saw sausages Long, raw sausages being sliced violently with sushi knives and cleavers.

On the day of my discharge, my parents drove for six hours to collect me. My penis needed to be supported at a 45-degree angle for a whole fortnight, so that the stitches would not be strained while it healed and adhered to my groin.

During my first night home, I was blindsided by the continuation of horrible, hallucinatory dreams. I looked up at the window, and saw the large mirror on my mother’s nightstand unfurl wings like a dark angel, silhouetted against the streetlight shining through the thin curtains. Was this the Angel of Death? It couldn’t be, I reasoned. It was too small. Oh, shit. Perhaps it was the Angel of Penis Death. That was it. The Angel of Penis Death had come to herald the demise of my penis, scant day safer its birth. Was there a penis heave? Would it romp with boobs and vaginas in fields of lush pubic hair?

If I were to die, I wondered, what would I come back as? I decided, after several hours of bleak rumination, that might like to be a clownfish. Clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites. They are born male, but they can turn themselves into females. They have the ability, in short to change their gender by sheer force of will. They live in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and they budge about coral reefs in symbiotic relationships with the anemones they make their homes. What a blissful existence.

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Juliana Kasumu

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These thought, of course, were a natural response to temporary pain.

Now I’m healed and whole. it’s useless to deny the pain of the process of transformation, but I describe it not in a spirit of complaint, but in celebration. Now, despite my fading scars, my very complicated, very laborious, very human gender transition has made me feel like a real person, at last.

My body is me, and vice versa, and what a wonderful, revelatory, stunning feeling that is. And I don’t say this lightly, but if reincarnation is in fact A Thing, I’d be proud as punch to reappear on this earth as a transgender person.

Before my physical transition, I was swimming in circles, relying on a two second memory. I’d remember, from time to time, why I was so desperately unhappy: why I couldn’t find fulfilment, or get a really beautiful, satisfying glide along a current that felt just right. Until I realised there was so much more. And I leapt out into the ocean.

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Changing Faces

We attribute great significance to faces.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through The Looking Glass (1871), Humpty Dumpty warns Alice that he might not recognise her if they should meet again, because her face is so regular. If her features were more creatively arranged, he reasons, that would make things easier.

Blonde, symmetrical Alice looks at him aghast. ‘But it wouldn’t look nice!’ she protests, to which Humpty Dumpty replies, ‘Wait till you’ve tried.’

On this side of the looking glass, we all try to look different from time to time, with varying degrees of success.

But being different naturally, or being rendered different by an accident or condition, is another thing entirely.

Despite our attempts to be perceived as unique, for the most part we all fit somewhere within the bounds of aesthetic ‘normality’. At this point I should probably note that I’m one of the few who don’t quite fit, thanks to a port wine stain 20

birthmark on my right cheek—a series of vivid fuchsia patches that snake from the outer corner of my right eye across my cheek and into my hairline, covering most of the right side of my face. Years of laser surgery have faded the patches from deep purple to pink, and ordinarily I cover them with makeup so that in everyday life I can shrug off my difference without too much difficulty. But recently, something’s shifted. As our visual culture becomes increasingly fixated upon a narrow ideal of airbrushed perfection, I’ve been reconsidering what it means to be ‘different’. In attempting to answer that question, I’ve spent the last six months talking to women who don’t quite ‘fit’, either.

When the nurse held a mirror up and I saw the face looking back, I asked which

of them had drawn it on because it wasn’t me.

Claudia Paterson

My first meeting is with Tulsi. Small and sharp-eyed, she is friendly but intimidating and exudes a steely confidence.

We’re sitting in a crowded café, and the conversation naturally turns to starers, about whom she is defiant. “I think, now, I’d rather give them something to stare at. If you’re going to look, look properly. I try to make them feel as uncomfortable as they make me.” When Tulsi was just ten years old, she survived a plane crash in which she lost both parents and her brother. Waking up in hospital, her eyes bandaged and her mind dulled by sedation, she says she found the accident hard to comprehend. ‘I can hear voices around me,’ she describes waking up in hospital, slipping into the present tense. “my cousins speaking, my family speaking, and the voices are very close. I’m wondering why my parents aren’t here and they’re trying to explain but it’s not getting through.” For two months, while she underwent intensive treatment for the severe burns that covered her face and body, Tulsi remained unaware of the extent to which her appearance had been altered. She can’t remember if it was she or one of the nurses who first suggested looking in a mirror. “At that point, I didn’t know what burns looked like’, she explains.”So, I was inquisitive more than anything. When the nurse held a mirror up and I saw the face looking back, I asked which of them had drawn it on because it wasn’t me.”

In his book, Changing Faces: The Challenge of Facial Disfigurement (1990), James Partridge highlights this moment as definitive in the psychological recovery of a patient with a disfiguring injury. In a sense, it’s actually a repetition of Lacan’s Mirror Phase, the moment an infant first becomes aware of themselves as an ‘I’, which occurs somewhere around the age of 6 to months A unique identity begins to construct itself from this moment on, combining one’s own—often rather delusional—sense of self with the reactions of other people. Partridge, who sustained

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severe facial scarring when he was 18, argues that after an incident resulting in disfigurement this process must be repeated, fracturing the self-image that existed before.

As the port wine stain on my cheek is a birthmark, I have never undergone this kind of re-identification. A few weeks later, I am introduced to Amanda, who was born with a double cleft lip and cleft palate, clubbed feet, missing fingers and no tear duct in her left eye. When I ask her whether there’s a distinction to be made between those who are born with differences and those who sustain them later, she is thoughtful: “if you’re getting bullied for it from the start, that’s how you define yourself. Being born the way I have been makes it a strong part of my identity. It’s not like I have pictures of myself from before to gaze at. This is me.” Amanda has had 39 operations at last count, 25 of which took place before the age of five. If you have always lived with visible difference, in a strange, destructive way you’re encouraged to wait for that moment of psychological Throughout these conversations, the importance of institutions—medical, educational and governmental—becomes increasingly apparent. From the moment a child is born with a visible difference, or an individual is brought in with appearance-altering injuries, they enter into a new kind of relationship with public services. The first, and most enduring of these relationships is with the hospital. Tulsi remembers her initial period of treatment and recuperation as an oasis of calm before her reintroduction to the outside world. “In hospital, I always felt safe because no one treated me differently,” she explains. “On a burns unit they’re accustomed to seeing those kinds of injuries and the doctors and nurses were always incredibly kind to me.

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Changing Faces

Amanda’s experience was quite the reverse. “I have really horrible memories of hospital. It was the 80s, when children weren’t really listened to in that environment and my first surgeon was ex-army so he didn’t call me by name, just “the cleft girl”. I became rather phobic of surgery.” Later on, when Amanda was picking up cleaning jobs to fund her Masters degree, she found that the industrial cleaning products evoked the smell of hospital operating theatres, making her feel violently sick. Even now, lying with her back flat on the floor recalls the sensation of being wheeled into surgery on a gurney.

I meet Natalie—an assistant at a prominent telecommunications company—during her lunch break in a coffee shop in the financial district.

Diagnosed with vitiligo when she was just two years old, she describes similar rounds of treatment. It began when her parents noticed a small mark, bright white, almost albino, on her hand, which stood out starkly against her caramel skin. ‘In the 80s it was quite difficult to diagnose someone with vitiligo because people didn’t necessarily know what it was,’ Natalie explains. But after 18 months, 75 per cent of her legs, arms and face were also affected. ‘From that point on I was in and out of hospital—it felt like it was every week. Tring different creams, different patient trials.’

Natalie retreated into herself. ‘I didn’t’ want to answer questions about it, see it or look at it,’ she says sadly. ’I wore two pairs of thick black opaque tights because I hated the idea of anyone realizing that there was something different about me.’

Amanda’s father, whom she describes after a pause as ‘often horrible’, developed a fixation with her surgeries, projecting unrealistic expectations onto the results and telling her that once she completed them all she would look like a 22

At some point in my twenties, my father actually said to me, “you never got to the point I hoped you would, physically.” I suppose he finally gave up on me turning into a model. model. Although they never discussed Amanda’s condition as a family, her father documented everything religiously, photographing her before, during and after every surgery, despite her protestations, and typing out every minute detail. ‘He used to rush in and say, “I’ve read in the Daily Mail that they’re growing fingers!” I remember telling him I didn’t want anyone to grow fingers for me.’ When I suggest that in some way, he saw her as an unfinished body, Amanda nods gravely, ‘Definitely. At some point in my twenties, he actually said to me, “You never got to the point I hoped you would, physically,” I supposed he finally gave up on me turning into a model.’

The prevailing assumption, in both medical and social treatment of difference is that we all want to be ‘normal’. For Tulsi, Amanda, Natalie and myself, treatment began well before the age of sexual consent, before the drinking age, and before any of us could vote. I make these comparisons only to highlight the unique way in which we regard ‘correction’ as the default response to difference. In the cases of Amanda and Tulsi, many of the operations that they underwent in their early years were for purely medical reasons and intended to reduce discomfort, as opposed to achieving any kind of aesthetic improvement. Still, the psychological effect of being treated as

a work in progress is a pernicious one.

Natalie recalls her mother in the kitchen, mixing up different combinations of creams, storing them in the fridge overnight and then slapping them onto her skin the next morning, hoping for a miraculous recovery. ‘When I think back now,’ she says, ‘I would never fault her for doing that because she was following the doctors’ advice. But she was doing it to make me look like everyone else and I don’t think we need to do that anymore.’

Tulsi describes attending a workshop to learn how to cover up scarring and visible injuries with the medical makeup skin Camouflage. She told the expert that she wanted to conceal the pigmentation and uneven textures on her arm, the result of several necessary skin grafts shortly after her accident. Once it was covered, ‘I suddenly started to have a panic attack because I couldn’t see my arm; its textures and colors.’ The expert removed it immediately, but on the car journey home Tulsi was still wiping at it, trying to get it all off. ‘I didn’t expert to feel that,’ she says slowly, ‘I thought I would be happy.’ Tulsi’s surprise at preferring herself uncovered seems to identify another prevailing assumption within our culture—that beauty correlates to happiness. Achieve the former and the latter will follow, no soul-searching required.

Claudia Paterson

Natalie sees things in a rosier light.

Having, as a child, been struck by the lack of faces that looked like hers, she finds the recent upswing in positive representation of models of colour and with disabilities cheering. Winnie Harlow, a model with vitiligo, has become one of the most recognisable faces in the industry and takes pains to be seen with and without makeup. ‘I think it’s a lot easier to have a skin condition or disfigurement today,’ asserts Natalie, ‘and in 15 to 20 years time it’ll be even easier. I think I was born in the last generation where it wasn’t cool to be different.

Now, it’s cool.’

One commonality that does emerge from these polarised visions of the future is the importance of the narrative we construct as a society. To deliberately misquote Orwell: whoever controls

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the present controls the future and, as members of a (nominally) democratic society, the agency lies with us. It seems that a simple reframing of the narrative surrounding difference could have a profound effect. When she was about 15, Amanda spent some time volunteering with the Brownies, who she saw were fascinated by her hands.

Instead of scolding the children for looking, or concealing them in her pockets, she made up a story in which her hands were a forest filled with rare trees and shrubs, teeming with enchanted animals.

The children were transfixed. ‘They were like, “Wow, you’re magical,’” she laughs.

‘So I said, “Yeah, your hands are boring!’”

And just like that, for a moment, the paradigm was reversed.

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Picturing Terror

Bassel Barhoum hugs his mother, Jamila Marshid, during his brother’s funeral in the village of Daquqa. Abu Layth died while fighting for the Syrian Army, Latakia Province, Syria, 2013, Andrea Bruce

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Lynsey Addario, Giles Duley, Andrea Bruce

The tension between terror and beauty has existed at the heart of photojournalism since its inception: it is a practice that originates from recording conflicts through a medium that is intrinsically aesthetic. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it, photography cannot delict’s tenement house or a refuse heap without transfiguring it’ The most groundbreaking photojournalism of the 20th and 21st centuries offers a harrowing documentation of some of history’s most terrible conflicts, human rights abuses and environmental disasters. To quote Susan Sontag, from her seminal book Regarding the Pain of

Others, photographs can never simply be ‘a transparency of something that happened’ because ‘to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude’ (2003).

Ultimately, they are the authored works of the photographers who took them: subjective documents of history for which lighting, composition and subject matter have all been taken into account.

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Khouloud and Jamal, Bekka Valley, Lebanon, 2014, Giles Duley

Here, acclaimed photojournalists Andrea Bruce, Giles Duley and Lynsey Addario shed light on how they have negotiated photographing a moment of terror as documentarians, using what is, unavoidably, an artistic medium.

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Picturing Terror

Kahindo, 20, sits in her home with her two children born out of rape in the village of Kayna,

Lynsey Addario

North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2008, Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist who regularly works for the New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine. Over the past 15 years, Addario has covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises of her generation, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. In 2015, she released her first book, It’s What I Do, which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world and went on to be a New York Times bestseller. In the same year, American Photo magazine named Lynsey one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, writing that ‘Addario changed the way we saw the world’s conflicts.’ When she’s not travelling, she lives in north London with her husband Paul and their six-year-old son Lucas.

I remember walking into Kahindo’s hut, and seeing her in the light of the window, shrouded in a mosquito net with her two small children who had been born out of rape. It was so incongruous—the painterly beauty of the three of them sitting there, juxtaposed with the horrific story she then relayed to me.

She was one of the countless victims of the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008: Kahindo had been kidnapped and held captive in the bush for almost three years by numerous Interahamwe soldiers who violated her again and again. I was documenting rape as a weapon of war in the DRC with my first ever grant, and spent two weeks criss-crossing the remote villages of North and South Kivu, where death, torture, and rape had become so commonplace, the better part of the population was palpably traumatized.

The brutality of rape is difficult to capture in a still image. With a photograph,

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a photographer is often trying to evoke something that happened in the past, and the pain and horror of that moment are present only in a survivor’s testimony, in her posture, her gaze. It is human nature to turn away from brutality, so I try to use light color and beauty to lure the viewer into the horror of reality; an average of 400 women per month were estimated to be sexually assaulted in the autumn of 2007 in eastern Congo.

People often look at this image of Kahindo, and comment on how beautiful it is: they assume it is a simple portrait of a mother and her children. And then they start asking questions, and I realise.

I have done my job by opening the door to Kahindo’s testimony.

The brutality of rape is difficult to capture in a still image. With a photograph, a photographer is often trying to evoke something that happened in the past, and the pain and horror of that moment are present only in a survivor’s testimony, in her posture, her gaze. It is human nature to turn away from brutality, so I try to use light, color, and beauty to lure the viewer into the horror of reality: an average of 400 women per month were estimated to be sexually assaulted in the autumn of 2007 in eastern Congo.

People often look at this image of Kahindo, and comment on how beautiful it is: they assume it is a simple portrait of a mother and her children. And then they start asking questions, and I realise, I have done my job by opening the door to Kahindo’s testimony.

Lynsey Addario, Giles Duley, Andrea Bruce

Beauty

Andrea Bruce Through documentary photography, Andrea Bruce brings attention to people living in the aftermath of war. She is a co-owner and member of the photo agency NOOR. For eight years she chronicled the world’s most troubled areas as a staff photographer for the Washington Post, focusing particularly on the conflict in Iraq, before going freelance. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including top honors for the White House News Photographers Association and has exhibited internationally.

In Syria, working for the New York Times, I photographed a funeral: a Syrian lieutenant had died in the war. To get there I was granted a visa and escorted by the Syrian regime, Assad’s regime, which is seen as an enemy to many in the US. Fear is pervasive in Syria. There is fear of the government, fear of militias and a fear of backlash—of minorities and majorities. Of the other. No one is immune from the fear.

It isn’t the beauty of war that I attempt to capture.

It is the beauty in humanity’s attempt to survive and love.

The entire village gathered at the family’s house on their way to the funeral.

He was the village’s first son, killed for a cause from which the village is far removed. I photographed the mother’s loss and his brother’s rage. These were things I knew people in the US could understand, regardless of their politics.

Susan Sontag wrote in her book, On Photography, that’ what determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness.’ But emotional consciousness, empathy, is far more universal and can impact a person even in the absence of a political consciousness. Our eyes are drawn to beautiful light and composition but powerful emotions leave an impression and shake the conscience.

Photography is an imperfect form. But it is the best medium to bring people closer to reality, make the invisible seen, and help people see themselves in others. Without beauty, few would pay attention.

And beauty, as I see it, happens in everyday life. The glance of an eye. The caress of a cheek. Light, color. The combination of movements like a dance, frozen in a toast or a touch. Some say that war photography often mimics paintings of the past. But I believe the paintings of the past simply mimic the grace of violence— in its chiaroscuro shades and layered compositions—of everyday life. Everyday life that happens within war and without.

As a photographer, my job is to bridge the differences that are so often amplified in war. It’s our shared humanity that I want people to see. The beauty of love’s darkest form, loss, suffered on both sides in war. War is rarely black and white, though we would like it to be. The people fighting are rarely the people determining a war’s path.

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The Eye of the Beholder

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Bex Day

Beauty

“This evening, I came out of the front door of the house and it was raining. I stood for a few minutes lost in the beauty of it. Rain brings out the contours of what’s around you in that it introduces a blanket of differentiated and specialized sound which fills the whole of the audible environment. Instead of being isolated, cut off, preoccupied internally, you are presented with a world, you are related to a world, you are addressed by a world. Why should this experience strike one as beautiful?

Cognition is beautiful It’s beautiful to know.”

In this extract from his acclaimed audio diaries first published in 1990, John Hull, the academic and theologian who started to go blind in his thirties, describes his experience of hearing rain falling. Despite being brought up in a sighted world, John learned to let his other senses take priority and to find beauty and contentment in alternative experiences. Today, we are bombarded with feeds of ‘beautiful’ images , but the beauty offered to us feels like it’s becoming more confined, reduced to something singular, pictorial and pleasing to the eye. Instagram, for example, has made us more concerned than ever with ours , and others’, outward appearance. Looking at something beautiful might once have brought pleasure and a sense of emotional well-being, but now it often brings anxiety, insecurity and self-hatred. Ladybeard interviewed several blind and visually impaired people to investigate how they define beauty, and to try to look beyond a sighted person’s automatic response that relates beauty to something both physical and visible. We spoke to people ranging in ages, backgrounds and life stories?

A ten-year-old boy at school, a theatre director, a comedian, an archer. In these interviews, beauty becomes multi-sensory and connected to something are greater than one’s lame.

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The Eye of the Beholder

Tom Britton When Tom was in his late teens and working as a chef, his hereditary eye disease became aggressive and it was confirmed that he would go blind. He’s lost all sight in his right eye and has 12 percent remaining in his left eye. He lives with his wife and their four children.

What is your concept of beauty?

When I could see, it was probably a typical pretty face, nice figure etc. But as my vision has deteriorated, it’s now more about connection or chemistry. I brought a picture of my wife with me, not to illustrate that she beautiful, but because she is beautiful to me. We’ve been together since we were 13. That right there is a beautiful connection in itself, and that has grown, as we’ve grown.

Daniel White Daniel is ten years old and was born eight weeks premature an visually impaired. He can see a small amount: light and shadows and colour.

What do you find beautiful?

Objects that I can feel and touch. Small things mainly. Because I can keep them close to me and because my hands can explore the entirety of their body. .

Tell me about a recent experience that struck you as beautiful.

When I was given a glass octopus. I think it’s beautiful because it’s well made and it’s artistic and it’s detailed, and because my mum has described it to me and she says it’s beautiful. All of that gives me a relatively good idea of how beautiful it is.

When someone says something is beautiful, what do you imagine?

I imagine something smooth, sleek, well-polished and detailed.

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Bex Day

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Kimberley Heal Kimberley became visually impaired when she was eight years old. She is the eldest of five and two of her siblings have the same condition although their symptoms are different. Archery is Kimberley’s favourite hobby.

When someone says someone is beautiful, how do you think they feel?

Most of the time when people are talking about beauty, I feel there’s a bit of envy in there: it’s them longing for something else, or to be somewhere else or to be part of something else which they don’t feel that they have currently within them or around them. Sometimes it’s difficult for people to have sight of what they’ve got and they see beauty as something removed from them.

How has your relationship to your sight changed?

When I was a young teen, I was quite wayward, and I was depressed about life in general , but my sight as well I felt negative about it.

But as I’ve grown up, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing and to be honest I think, now, if I could make my sight normal tomorrow just having an injection or taking a drug .I’m not sure that I would feel that comfortable It’s not such a big thing holding me back now , because my attitudes changed.

Terry James When Terry was nine years old, she was diagnosed with a genetic condition called stargate dystrophy which effects the central vision. In her thirties, she was re-diagnosed because her peripheral vision was also being affected. It’s a progressive condition which may eventually result in total blindness.

What is your concept of beauty?

I’ve been brought up in a sighted world and I’ve been told I’m quite a visual person. If I’m standing on the top of a hill and I’m aware that there is space around me and there is a view in front of me, I can imagine that view I can be around nature and feel the beauty of that: the feel of the fresh air. the sounds of the birds and cows, the tress rustling, the greenery. I still think in visual terms, but I am also learning to find beauty in other things.

And in a person?

I’ve been told my husband is good-looking, but I’m not aware of that I’m aware of his shape and his body but in terms of the details of his face, I couldn’t tell you if he was good-looking or not. I’m quite pleased when people comment on his good looks, even though I don’t know why it should matter to me. Does it say something about me perhaps? My husband is good-looking therefore he could attract a good-looking woman and he’s chosen me, so perhaps he thinks I’m good-looking. What makes someone attractive to me?

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The Eye of the Beholder

Maxine Plowden Maxine was born with her sight loss. She doesn’t have a retina in her right eye, so she mostly sees with her left eye, which is also short sighted Her eyesight will always be stable—it will never get better or worse. She writes a blog and is currently job-hunting.

What is your concept of beauty?

There’s something very serene about the moon and the stars. I like the stars because I think there’s something more out there for us. If I’m near a river-the sound can be beautiful Chime bells are a beautiful sound to me, the ones that blow in the wind.

Other people might find them annoying, but I find them beautiful.

When someone says something is beautiful, what do you imagine?

I imagine a feeling-something calm and relaxing. You can see something, and it can make you feel happy I find beauty in the way an experience makes me feel.

Bianca Von Stempel Bianca is visually impaired and a recent fashion student from Kingston University. Her graduate women swear collection was braille-inspired and she is currently setting up her own clothes brand.

Tell me about a recent experience which struck you as beautiful.

Trying on clothes and being really fearlessly experimental with makeup. I love experimenting with mascara and eye-liner, even though they are tricky for me to apply. I’ve recently started to get my nails done, and just the experience of going into a salon and feeling like someone’s doing something for you is really wonderful. But also clothes, the textures of fabric. I love details, the shininess or maybe the slight touches of glitter in a garment.

When you want to wear something and you put it on and it makes you feel amazing. I think that’ s a real sight of beauty.

Reflecting you inside as well.

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Bex Day

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Tom Skelton Tom is a comedian who started to go blind on stage at The Edinburgh Fringe.

What is your concept of beauty?

I buy a lot of sandwiches from supermarkets and I always used to carefully choose the one I wanted. But now the writing’s far too small for me to read and it’s become quite a fun ritual to just pick one up at random. Then there can be a moment of beauty when you realize you’ve made a brilliant decision: a falafel and hummus wrap with chili sauce.

Have there been moments since you lost your sight that you have found transformative? I’m thinking about turning points here in your relationship to your sight, or experiences that have changed the way you feel about going blind?

I imagine a feeling-something calm and relaxing. You can see something, and it can make you feel happy I find beauty in the way an experience makes me feel.

Having a romantic thing with somebody - that’s transformative. In the beginning, I was worried if anyone would be able to love a blind man. But I’ve realized people find it quite interesting romantically. Can you tell what I look like? “ is a question I’m often asked on a date I can see people; it just takes me longer to build up a picture of them. What someone can see in a glance, I can see after a while or a lot more looking.

Maria Oshodi Maria Oshodi is a writer and director and founder of Extant, a company pioneering theatre practice with the express inclusion of visually impaired performers and audiences.

Tell me about a recent experience which struck you as beautiful.

A friend of mines just got a new guide dog which met yesterday, and it’s always a surprise because you don’t get the visual before the feel: you get the feel first the unexpectedness of the moment made it beautiful When you see something, you have all sorts of assumptions that may or may not make you want to a sense. I can hear the dog, but my impression isn’t touch it-you already have an impression, an anticipate determined as someone seeing the dog, and so the experience of touching him is almost more intense It’s a real discovery.

Does beauty have the power to move you in a meaningful way?

Beauty makes you stop. It’s strangely symbiotic. Beauty is linked to things that are still and beauty forces you pause, to take in what you are seeing and to be present to the moment.

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Bleu

Alix Marie 34

All images excerpts from Bleu, published by Morel Books, 2017 courtesy of the artist.

Alix Marie

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Working across the mediums of photography and sculpture, London-based artist Alix Marie is renowned for her candid images of the body’s surface. From a tearing eye to bruised, goose-pimpled skin, her hyper-real photographs capture an array of textures and strange details, simultaneously inciting desire and disgust.

Using innovative methods of exhibition, Marie encourages the viewer to question their relationship to the body and the ways in which they are represented. The human body is a canvas of contradiction, both beautiful and grotesque, and Marie’s work brings this duality to the fore , encouraging us to consider our skin and flesh in a new light.

Marie’s first publication, Bleu, was released last year with Morel Books. In 2018 she will have a solo exhibition at the prestigious Dusseldorf Photo Weekend after winning their 2017 Portfolio Review Award.

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‘I will pay any money to suck your toes’

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@maz_green

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Sarah Roberts tracks down her Instagram obsession I am obsessed with @maz_green. I refresh Instagram every two minutes, and about half of that time is spent pouring over Maz’s feed I think about Maz’s bikini pictures at the gym while I struggle to do a plank, I’ve shown photos of her to my hairdresser-and I have spent hours of my life traipsing between Boots and Superdrug, trying to locate the exact shade of shin lilac lipstick that Maz wore in one particular selfie from15 January 2015 .

Maz isn’t famous or anything, although she does have almost three thousand Instagram followers, and her feed is full of photos of infinity pools and selfies taken with hedgehogs in Tokyo. She’s someone I vaguely know we met at a party around eight years ago (but she probably doesn’t remember it). We’ve crossed paths a few times since then, and she’s always been sweet and polite, and clearly oblivious about how much I stalk her on social media. Our very tenuous connection makes me all the more obsessed with her; her life seems both completely of a different world, while also strangely entwined with mine.

Recently it’s all got a bit much. So, in the spirit of self-care (and cutting-edge journalism) I slid into Maz’s DMs and invited her out to dinner. I hoped that telling her my feelings might help me to see her more as a human being, and less as a perpetually tanned selfie with perfect hair. Maybe finding out her deepest darkest Instagram secrets might free me of some of mine?

What follows is an excerpt from our conversation.

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‘I will pay any money to suck your toes’

Instead of taking a selfie because I think I look good in someone’s bathroom light, I now want to take a selfie in the hills of Positano with a drone.

How did you feel when I told you that I stalked you on Instagram and invited you to dinner?

Not too surprised to be honest, and that’s not said in a cocky way. Social media can connect us so easily, so it’s not very shocking that someone would stalk me. I’ve had people tell me they stalk me before and I’ve told people I stalk them. I’m flattered, really. I think it’s important to make people feel appreciated. I’ve also found a lot worse in my DMs, things like ‘I will pay any money to suck your toes’ and once something strangely descriptive and specific; ‘I want to paint you shile smoking a cigar, drinking wine on a porch, and then get drunk with you in a vineyard’.

That sounds quite positive. But do you think your relationship with Instagram has always been a positive one?

Before I became comfortable with myself there was an ugly side to it. I used to like and followers as self -validation. They became my axes of popularity, which is a sad thing to admit. I got wrapped up in that world and it made me insecure.

I’m not sure if I’ve got to that point yet. Instagram can make me feel jealous and insecure because I find myself looking at pictures of you and other beautiful women. Does looking at girls on Instagram ever make you feel that way?

I would never want to use it to make anyone feel that way. I’m trying to make my Instagram into a travel page, so I am using it to inspire people to travel. All the people I used to follow were hot girls who would just take selfies, and naturally you start to compare yourself. You really do get sucked into it. But then, as I matured I realized that looking at all of these selfies wasn’t inspiring me or making me feel excited or good about myself, so started following different sorts of people The only person I’ve ever tried to elicit a negative reaction from is my boyfriend. When we have fights I’ Il put on loads of makeup and take a photo to be like “ look at how hot I am. I think you are always trying to tell a story through your photos, but that story isn’t necessarily real.

What kinds of fights do you have with your boyfriend?

Well, it took me a while to realize that someone liking his photo, or him following someone on Instagram, didn’t mean that in real life they were having a relationship That is show insecure it could make me. Now I can look back on it and feel sorry for myself. I can’t believe how much energy could waste feeling so strongly about something that wasn’t real.

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@Maz_green

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How accurately do you think your Instagram page reflects your real life then ?

I don’t think you see the mundane aspects of my life on my Instagram. I post photos of myself away when I’m actually at home in London. It is very contrived especially now that I want to make Instagram into my career. Instead of taking a selfie because I think I look good in someone’s bathroom lighting, I now want to take a selfie in the hills of a Positano with a drone. I want to expand the photo, and curate the image into something unique and interesting. I’ll stay up until one or two in the morning to practice with my drone, or to practice editing. You’ve got to put time and money in to do this, but it’s so worth it because the images you can create are so much more powerful when you do. I’m also an oil broker, and I don’t think that anyone who knows me through Instagram would know that. because it doesn’t translate at all. Sometimes it feels like I’m living a double life. When people at work found out I owned a drone, they were like, Are you a geek? Are you really into this kind of technology? “ They had no idea.

Instagram is like crack for my index finger. How much time do you think you spend on it?

Probably about half of each day, but now it’s because I’m researching If I’ve put up a photo that day, then I’ll continually refresh my page, because I want to measure the reception I’ve gotten To be honest though, even before I started thinking about making this into a career. I used to spend about half of each day on there, but in the worst possible way. I would find myself 154 weeks deep into my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends husbands fish feeder’s photos wondering how I got there.

I have definitely spent many hours going 154 weeks deep into your photos. How much time do you think you spend actually taking them?

A lot. Everything I post is heavily curated. I’m strategic now: I’ll try to follow color schemes, for example, I’ve read that people respond best to the color blue on Instagram, so I’ve started to put up more images of water. And unfortunately, you can’t take the most amazing photo in Positano on the beach at midday, because there will be hundreds of people around you blocking your photo. I had to get up at five in the morning to set up the drone, and then wait until the sun was in the right spot to take it.

It’s a real process, and it’s so much to do with lighting, so when I go somewhere I also must look at things like where the sun sets and at what time. Every photo has a ridiculous story behind it. was once attacked by snake charmers in Marrakesh because I was trying to pose with their snakes.

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The Eye of the Beholder

Female Prison

Lilia Li-Mi-Yan 37 40

Lilia Li-Mi-Yan

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Lilia Li-Mi-Yan is an award-winning Turkmen photographer who has been based in Moscow since1991. Her series of photographs explore the problematic nature of feminine beauty in our society, refusing to offer the viewer a straightforward critique. Female Prison (2013) is one example: Li-Mi-Yan travelled to the only women’s prison in Armenia to photograph the prisoners. As the women don’t have a specific uniform, and are allowed to use cosmetics, they continue to dress as they did in their free life. Through Li-Mi-Yan’s images it seems beauty is not a facade but an essential part of their survival on the inside. Li-Mi-Yan refers to Stendhal’s aphorism that “ beauty is the promise of happiness”. For the women who look back at us in the pictures, made-up for the camera-and therefore for us, the viewer—surrounded by their few possessions, that beauty is exactly that: a promise of another life.

Words by Charlotte Jansen

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Irun Kiko

Muse Jo Broughton

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Juliana Kasumu

Featuring Anton Gottlob, Bolade Banjo, Bradley Lloyd Barnes, Elliot Kennedy, Oliver Hadlee Pearch, Thurstan Redding, Will Grundy, Yann Faucher Photography Assistant Bolade Banjo

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Muse

Jo Broughton

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The female muse, as seen through the male gaze, is a timeless image—so ingrained in our cultural psyche, it is almost unnoticeable. Jo Broghton’s series, Muse, takes this motif as its starting point and f lips it. Eight male photographers, who all work with female models in their day jobs, were invited to pose in front of the camera. They were asked to take inspiration from a classical image of the nude Venus reclining, sensually, on a bed. Here are the results: enjoy...

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Muse

Jo Broughton

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Juliana Kasumu

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