Meet Savanna. She's 2. Turned into a piece of hooker meat by parents hoping to win a child beauty pageant. In a country ready to lynch Roman Polanski for an alleged paedophilic episode that happened 32 years ago, on the grounds that a minor is a minor and must be protected at all costs, no one seems to mind the pornographic nature of such pageants, whose older contestants are 10, with infants starting at 1.Photographer Susan Anderson recently published High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants, a series of portraits that acknowledge her fascination for the genre. "I thought, what if I went to one place and I could get a bunch of people at once already in hair and makeup -- it was a dream!" she told artillery magazine, adding that "From purely technical standpoints, since I do a lot of retouching on fashion and beauty things, I thought, I won't even have to retouch the photographs." (The meat is so perfectly fresh!)
Not once did Anderson denounce the sickness of such pageants. Instead, when artillery's interviewer Tulsa Kinney asked her whether she felt she contributed to what is stigmatized as their exploitative, oppressive nature, "Without missing a beat, she dismissed the idea, explaining how she's used to people looking like something they're not," writes Kinney. "I'm fascinated by the transformational quality of cosmetics, and the illusion involved with photography," said Anderson, "You know, you look at a photograph of a movie star and you know how much work has been done to that picture. It's not the way the person really looks in life."
"Anderson's reply was convincing," writes Kinney. "After all, the pageants are voluntary events -- at least for the stage mothers." Anderson added, "It's really not about the children, what I'm doing. They happen to be the subject." Subject, or paedophilic object?
It *is* about the children, and about what could be qualified as child abuse. That Anderson and Kinney fail to denounce, or simply address the repulsive nature of such pageants, is astounding.
Additional review + pix in Los Angeles magazine.
UPDATE 10/18/09: How Young Is Too Young To Be be Slutty Whatever For Halloween?
photo Susan Anderson via LAmag.com
3 comments:
ABUSE = Abnormal Use. I would certainly say that child pageants qualify. Only legal adults should be allowed to enter beauty contests. Thanks for speaking out!
Child pageant contestants scream out to just about every paedophile around. It's basically encouraging children to be seen as sexy to adults. It's gross.
"I'm fascinated by the transformational quality of cosmetics, and the illusion involved with photography," said Anderson.
I will more adamantly state that this is simply art babble because Andersons honest response was to equate these young people as being "meat that is so perfectly fresh."
It is also voluntary to participate and to document an event which she supposedly says she denounces however says also:
"It was a dream!" What a two faced piece of Obama-style deceitful lying! Ten bucks Anderson is not making photographs at all but rather has been sucked into the dull and limited world of digital camera work. What a bore!
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