"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."  

- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

 

Beautiful is a coffee table book of photographic portraits featuring Northumberland, Ontario area women and girls, spanning the decades from zero to one hundred. Smith-Clark’s photographs capture the character and poetry of female beauty in everyday life: from the delicacy of a newborn baby to the striking face of a one hundred and three year old woman.   The book includes brief biographies for many of the women featured in the book and also the photographer’s “notes on the shoot”.  

 

Please click on the slide show above to view a limited selection of the portraits from the book.

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BACKGROUND

 

"Many artists and photographers have inspired my work over the years, but for this book specifically I fell back on the photojournalism and humanist photography of the mid-20th century (Dorothea Lange, Robert Doisneau, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brasai... to name but a few).  I strive to find and capture the poetry of everyday life in my work. What I love about portraiture in particular is finding shots that capture genuine emotion, a glimpse of character and the environment of the subject, as opposed to surface beauty and current trends. 

 

I conceived the idea for Beautiful back in the fall of 2014. After photographing so many women and girls in the course of my work, I noticed a similar thread amongst my female subjects:  they consistently reported that they were “not photogenic” and were overly self-conscious and concerned with what they perceived as flaws.  As a photographic artist, I found that interesting because it is our flaws, our differences, that make us exceptional.  So my initial concept for this book was to portray the evolution of female beauty at different ages, covering every decade from zero to one hundred, from the point of view of an artist.  

 

I quickly learned the women in the book all had fascinating stories to tell as well, and I made the decision to include brief biographies wherever it was possible."

 

- Gillian Smith-Clark

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A portion of the proceeds from book sales will be donated to a local Northumblerand charity, The Kaitlyn Bates Initiative,  their mission is to help young girls ages 5-25 with self-esteem issues and you can visit the website here: http://www.kaitlynbatesinitiative.ca or like the foundation on facebook at: The Kaitlyn Bates Initiative

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For more information about Beautiful, please email to: info@amodernportrait.com or call 905.375.6441. 

Click here to buy a copy.

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Hardcover: 40 pages

Publisher: A Modern Portrait

ISBN: 978-0-9951607-0-5

CDN $55.00

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