The (ab)Use of Beauty, Chapter One

Visually situated in the French Alps, The (ab)Use of Beauty, Chapter One is a personal testimony of life in the mountains, while critically examining the desire for beauty in life, the use of aesthetics in photography, and the medium’s limited representation of reality. In this work, composed of image and text, the external movement of registration (the image) and the internal movement of analysis (the word) are indispensable to each other. By approaching the texts as ‘The Missing Image’, they can be seen as a mediator between ‘the image’ and ‘the real’, addressing the image’s limited representation of reality, emphasizing the image-maker’s responsibility and questioning the romanticized nature of images. The (ab)Use of Beauty, Chapter One was exhibited in 2022 after an eight-month mentorship at BREEDBEELD, but continues to be a work in progress; expanding, intertwining and polishing both image and text into a photo/text book. (Text and word are often activated during the exhibition, either as a live reading, audio performance, recorded voice-over or private reading. Rarely offered as a tangible object or printed version, text and word, performed in their originally intended vocal intonations, are therefore only available as audio recordings. Act of Reading The (ab)Use of Beauty, Chapter One : https://soundcloud.com/bovloors/theabuse-of-beauty)