“Meaning is clearly a subjective, affect-laden phenomenon.” – Bill Nichols
Many things add to and help shape our understanding of the world; experience, memory, cultural contexts, values, and beliefs are just a few of the things that aid in our understanding of this life (Nichols). For people, especially girls, our understanding of what beauty is is shaped by what we hear and see as we grow up. As an impressionable young child, my mother made an effort to help me define beauty in context to me.
Throughout my life, I have been fortunate and blessed enough to attend small private schools. For me, this meant I was usually one of a handful of non-white students and that most of my friends were white. Given what I was exposed to on a daily basis, as well as saturation from media and culture, I grew up subscribing to Westernized beauty ideals. I felt I came up short when compared to my fair-skinned, soft haired counterparts and I was jealous of my best friend for one attribute in particular: her blue eyes. To me, that was the penultimate mark of beauty. I didn’t care if nothing else changed about me, I wanted to have blue eyes.
For this mode assignment, I wanted to show off the beauty of brown eyes. Even though people who have blue eyes and other light-colored eyes are becoming in the minority, there is still this cultural ideal that light eyes are the best. In fact, since they are somewhat rare, this may help reinforce that belief. Because of this, I want to push back and embrace what I have, and have enlisted the help of my friend who also has brown eyes; she grew up with a bit of an inferiority complex surrounding her brown eyes as well, especially since her mother has green eyes.
I chose the performative mode to tell this story because it is subjective in tone and nature. It takes personal feelings and experience into consideration when it questions what knowledge is and how we come to acquire it. Nichols’ says of the performative mode that it “brings heightened emotional involvement to a situation…[it] brings the emotional intensities of embodied experience and knowledge to the fore.” My pictures attempt to capture my change in view about the importance of eye color, and accepting brown eyes as a mark of beauty as well.
**Click collages to enlarge them.**
3 Comments
This is really interesting. I don’t find myself making note of people’s eye color, but I do notice when I see a rare color and usually comment on how beautiful their eyes are! It’s something we tend to do as a culture – make quick judgements based on looks, sometimes without even noticing it. I could see photo essay becoming a part of a larger documentary focused on westernized culture and what we value in looks. I just saw a story on the news this morning talking about what men and women value in looks and how that differs, so this photo essay is definitely timely and relevant. Good job, Morgan!
Your photos did a great job of showing the beauty of brown eyes. After reading your blog post, I can understand how being a minority could easily influence your beauty ideals and be seen differently. Since the performative mode is pretty personal, I think you used it well in relating it to your idea of beauty and how you are trying to change it. The collages you made help get your project’s message across and do a great job of showcasing the beauty of brown eyes. Almost all of the women in my family have brown eyes and I’m pretty sure they have all wished to change it at least once. With brown eyes becoming the majority, I still think most people would want lighter eyes, but from this project, it is clear that a person’s ideal of beauty can change to see the beauty that they possess.
Morgan – The Brownest Eyes
Morgan, this is such a beautiful and new perspective! I know I have never appreciated my brown eyes. I even used this concept in my autobiographical doc mode photo essay with a picture of my eye. I think the photos you used are very successful at demonstrating the beauty of brown eyes. Also, the quote you used to introduce the subject matter of your photo essay was very well picked and it set the tone for the rest of the post. I couldn’t agree more with it: meaning really is a subjective phenomenon; the same way that the perception of beauty is subjective. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.