beauty

noun  |  beau·ty  |  ˈbyü-tē 

plural beauties

Beauty is knowing you're perfect and you are worthy just as you are. The natural workings of your body is your body doing a perfect job at what it does. Beauty does not mean flawless...What even is that? 

The quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit : loveliness. I don't remember the first or last time I kept a friend based on their waste size or appearance. I certainly wouldn't keep any friends that only kept me for my waste size.

HI I'M ALISHA!

Welcome to my journey!

I began this endeavor to photograph women in their most vulnerable state to empower them to feel beautiful in their own skin and coincidentally it landed with many women who fit societies idealistic view of what beauty is. 

However, my mission is to make a positive impact on the way our society views beauty and bring it back from its current state of distortion by celebrating all shapes & sizes. I welcome all, beauty is about the scars and imperfections that make us who we are today. 

I've had two sisters who both had eating disorders at some point in their life. Social Media and the comments from those around us make a huge impact on the way we see ourselves. During the year I was about to launch this project I lost one of my sisters. I became paralyzed in believing in the purpose of my mission and took a couple year break. 

For the last couple years since I began this mission and her death I've focused on the good, the things I miss, the things that could have been, the parts of her life I was grateful for, her sacrifices, the deep bond we shared that not everyone got to see, the laughter and the music before things got hard. It's quite empowering to reflect on all the good.

However, I also had lingering thoughts of the hard years. About lack of understanding, addiction and endless lies. But right after her death, I had a hard time reconciling those feelings with my grief, with the tragedy of possibilities lost, with the reality that I miss her fiercely. 

A story is not whole without a beginning, middle and an end and neither are we if we hollow out our experiences to make tidy the sense of the incomprehensible or conform to societies ideas.

With that I want to honor and welcome all women of all shapes and sizes. I want my photography to be about NOT conforming to the idealistic unattainable standard of beauty that the media shows. I want it to be about freeing women from the notion that they do not compare to it. It is about showing all woman that they, too, can look “like that” when they are pampered in the same way. 

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I kindly ask that you respect my mission for my galleries to be for the nature of beauty and only that...please DO NOT visit my galleries or view my pictures if you are not wanting to view them as only that.

Thank you so much for your understanding!

 

-Writer Elizabeth Dwyer helped in expressing my feelings and emotions

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