Media, popular culture, and the fashion industry have a very skewed, one-sided vision of the way women should look in order to be beautiful or desirable. In reality, women of all shapes, sizes, and types are beautiful. This one standard, created by one very small vein of human culture, should not dictate what is ideal. I have taken photographs of women in two contexts. The first objectively shows each woman as one might encounter them on an everyday basis. The second is a stylized fashion shoot that employs studio production to alter the woman's appearance, through extensive post-processing. By juxtaposing these two images side by side, I am confronting this “ideal beauty” and the implications it creates. It can, and does, cause women and girls to develop self-esteem issues.

What is beauty? Who decides what or who is beautiful? Is there one ultimate judge, or is it subjective? I want my audience to know and believe it is up to them. They do not have to follow what the mass media has decided is beautiful or sexy. Rejecting that ideal can help them create their own idea of beauty. They can decide for themselves which image of the woman is more desirable: the real likeness of the woman or the highly produced version of her. My hope is that most people would choose reality over the unrealistic, altered version.