Margo Ovcharenko

Am I Beautiful?

Hi!
How do I look to you?
How do I look to myself?

Every day, every second, sometimes without realising it, young women think about this. Clothes and poses protect them from omission points, help to form relationships, mixing up the cards of their competitors. This is necessary for survival. And when they’re alone with themselves, what are they like? In the epoch of Facebook, Photoshop, mass production and distribution, and the constant consumption of photography and images which form a canon to live up to, how do they find themselves?

What is the modern pursuit of beauty?
The understanding of beauty, abstract in itself, has become small change, hard currency, admission to an accessible and achievable dream. Having become accustomed to asking humankind’s only friend — the Internet — all our troublesome and pressing questions, we type in the simple question, ’Am I beautiful?’. In reply we receive a huge number of fairly primitive tests with surprising, though not entirely ridiculous, questions. Beauty today is measured, weighed, described in minute detail, according to social norms which are skilfully injected under society’s skin using marketing and convincingly celebrated by creative directors of advertising companies across the planet. One of the Russian tests is called, with a telling grammatical error, ’How much are you beautiful?’. Beauty, like any product, sells.

There was a time when intelligence, education and knowledge were just as important and necessary for success as love of beauty. It seems like our age looks down on intellectual abilities, preferring the god of appearances, endless consuming images of interchangeable beauties who appear on our screens and pages as rapidly as they disappear.

Margo Ovcharenko is a 25-year-old photographer from Krasnodar, a ‘small city of a million inhabitants‘. She is young and attractive. She knows what she’s talking about. Her main interest is an internal and, accordingly, difficult search made by young people of her generation. The search for beauty and harmony.

A momentary press of a camera button and the girls are frozen forever.
This gives us, the viewers looking in to their personal space, and the young ladies themselves, the chance to enjoy the moment, preserved for eternity. To breathe in beauty not only through the eyes but through the pores, through those parts of the body, which we don’t even realise exist. To examine the almost sculptural, three-dimensional corporeality of these lovely young faces. To almost touch the white skin, which is not always perfect, but is alive and breathing. To feel the effort of their body and spirit in front of the lens and in front of us. And what a diverse effort — enquiring, impudent, trusting, thoughtful, modest. Margo Ovcharenko captures these different moods, like unusual butterflies, and releases them on photographic paper. And here they are in front of us, they spread their wings, a flutter of the eyelashes, a pose, a turn of the head, inhale-exhale: excellent, you’re excited!

The question ‘Am I beautiful?’ pulsates quietly but insistently. Look at me, look me in the eye! Or no, I’ll turn away, I’ll look in to emptiness or infinity. Or I’ll shut my eyes, get lost in myself... or in you?

How do I look to you?
How do I look to myself?
I no longer care how I look to you. But it’s important that I like myself. Very much!
Isn’t that the beauty which people talk about?

Liza Fetissova