Beauty is one of those concepts that feels like it should be simple - and yet the more you look at it, the more it slips away. It's magnetic and exclusionary, empowering and oppressive, deeply personal and ruthlessly policed by culture. Which is exactly why photographers keep coming back to it.
Dazed Digital has spotlighted five photo books by women who are doing just that - each approaching beauty and body image from a completely different angle, and collectively making a compelling case for photography as the ideal medium to pull apart its contradictions.
Why photo books matter for this conversation
There's something about the photo book format that suits this kind of work. Unlike an exhibition or a social media scroll, a book asks you to slow down. You hold it, you turn pages, you sit with discomfort or delight. When the subject is something as loaded as beauty, that intimacy matters.
The five books highlighted by Dazed span a genuinely wide range of approaches - from competitive modelling pageants in Italy to more intimate, personal studies of the body. What unites them is a refusal to let beauty exist as a passive, uncomplicated thing. These photographers are interrogating it, prodding it, sometimes dismantling it entirely.
A long history, a fresh lens
Women photographers have long had a complicated relationship with beauty as subject matter - partly because they're so often on the receiving end of its judgments. That lived experience tends to produce work with real texture. There's an insider knowledge at play, a sensitivity to the way beauty functions as both gift and burden, that comes through clearly in this kind of photography.
The fact that these books come from women doesn't make them a monolith, though. The five highlighted by Dazed take very different stances - some tender, some critical, some somewhere in between. That range is the point.
Worth your bookshelf space
If you've ever felt like mainstream beauty culture was telling you something, but couldn't quite put your finger on what - this kind of work helps name it. Photo books like these don't hand you easy answers. They give you something better: a new way of looking.
Head over to Dazed Digital for the full rundown of all five titles, with context on each photographer's approach and what makes their work worth seeking out.
