And Look At Me Now

My story is about women who evaluate their bodies every day: how it looks, what size it is, how many scars it has. They worry about their nudity and reaction of people to it. They are used to hide parts of their bodies which “don’t look too good”, even if nobody else can see it.

I took pictures of more than 30 women of different age. Some of them were ready to take all the clothes off immediately, some asked me to take photos of their faces only. Many girls hadn’t had any nude photos before. After the shooting I gave them one photo and ask to “censor” it with red thread. There were no limits or preferences. They could leave it untouched (which many of them actually did) or make it all red.

Through these pictures I’m trying to show how painful can be this “self-censoring” and every attempt to make our faces or bodies look better, skinnier, prettier is not as harmless as we think. It always leaves traces on the image of ourselves.

Yana Bulgakova (1993) lives in St Petersburg, Russia. Currently she’s studying film theory in St Petersburg State University