Female Prison

Lilia Li-Mi-Yan

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