At first glance, The (ab)Use of Beauty (2022 - ongoing) may be perceived as a personal testimony of life at high altitude in the mountains. However, when diving deeper into its content, the work takes a critically look at our desire for beauty, the use of applied aesthetics in photography and the medium’s limited representation of reality.
Consisting of both images and texts, registration and analysis are indispensable to one another. By presenting the written texts as The Missing Image, they become mediators between ‘the image’ and ‘the real’, addressing the image’s limited representation of reality, the image-maker’s responsibility in relation to these representations, and the romanticized translation of reality that we often attribute to the photographic medium through the use of applied aesthetics.
The (ab)Use of Beauty, Chapter One is the first chapter of an ongoing image-text book project. The (ab)Use of Beauty is Vloors’ most ambitious project to date.
