My new photo project, “BEAUTY MADNESS” (Schönheitskoller), explores modern beauty ideals that distort women, making them look like dolls instead of celebrating their individuality.
The project questions these ideals in a satirical way, as society appears to be growing increasingly weary of them, along with the pressure of imposed beauty standards and false notions of egalitarianism.
In reality, these ideals reflect the mechanisms of the beauty industry, where profit is generated by exploiting women’s insecurities. Images of “beauty”, such as full lips or exaggerated body features, are relentlessly promoted through the media.
Every era has had its own notions of female beauty. Today, however, women are too often portrayed as sex objects. Many women have internalized these standards and focus excessively on “improving” themselves, though whether this leads to greater happiness remains an open question.
With this color photography series, the artist seeks to expose how banal and degrading these contemporary beauty clichés are, clichés that diminish women rather than empower them.
About Sabina Grams
Sabina Grams was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1980, one of the three Baltic States. She has lived in Germany since 2010, in a small town in the Burgenland district on the Unstrut, an area known for the writer Hedwig Kurt Mahler and the Nebra Sky Disk.
Alongside her artistic photography practice, she works professionally as a commercial photographer and runs a small photo studio. Creative from an early age, her artistic development intensified in 1996 when she enrolled in art school in Riga, specializing in sculpture, with painting also forming part of her training. After graduating, she studied Visual Communication at the Latvian Academy of Arts from 2001 to 2007, earning her bachelor’s degree in 2005 and her master’s degree in 2007. During the second half of her studies, she increasingly specialized in photography and worked with the renowned Latvian photographer Gunars Binde, who acted as both her lecturer and mentor, encouraging her to experiment with the medium while developing her own creative style.
She began taking photographs in 2001, while still studying sculpture, after purchasing her first analogue camera. This enabled her to undertake her first photographic assignments while she was still a student.
Since 2001, she has participated in numerous art exhibitions across Europe, and her photographs have been nominated for many international photography competitions, including the ND Awards, Chromatic Awards, Fine Art Photography Awards, Annual Photography Awards, and the Color Awards from Dodho Magazine. [Official Website]
