Blue Women centers on storefront beauty posters, sun-bleached over time to varying shades of blue. Though the original images were displayed to exploit conventional beauty standards, here the focus is redirected to the women’s expressions, gestures, and the details of their environment. Re-photographed in cities across four continents, the images draw inspiration from diverse sources including Anna Atkins’ botanical cyanotypes and feminist speculative fiction. Recognizing their ubiquity prompted reflections on how natural forces—time, light, and weather— shape our bodies and values. The work confronts myths surrounding beauty and aging while also considering the reverberations of a changing climate.
Stained and marked by scratches, dust, and glitches, the women appear watchful and contemplative, shifting between past and future, intimacy and distance. The beauty ads construct an imagined world—visions of life in harmony with nature, inhabited only by women. Yet traces of technological manipulation and the male gaze persist, embedded in pixelated flora and digitally altered faces and hands, exposing the contradictions within these images. Blanched by the sun’s gradual erasure, these altered images resist the consumerist ideals they were built on, flattening them and making them strange—creating, instead, a transitional space where new possibilities emerge.
