Celebrity Close-Up

So this is interesting. Usually, when we're subjected to images of celebrities, it's in advertising, on magazine covers, in films or on television. In these prepared images, they've been tweaked and recreated to something resembling a proto-human: airless, poreless, in perfect shape, wearing designer faces and spouting written speech. These are not the people, but the shells around the people that Hollywood wishes to sell to you. Or Chanel, ClearChannel, ProActiv, whoever. Corporate America takes famous people, builds a product around them then profits from that product. 

Which is why it's so interesting just to see celebrity faces without all that sheen. No professional lighting, no Photoshop. Makeup, sure, but that's a given--and this close, we can even see individual pores under all that foundation. We can see wrinkles and creases and spots and moles and all that stuff that makes up the good old-fashioned human face. We can see imperfections and we're not asked to balk at them. 

I mean, if you're a woman or girl in America, you've been conditioned to believe that the pores in your own goddamn face are somehow unnatural, unsightly abominations that must be smoothed over with a $14 bottle of Caucasian-colored goop. The base unit of that awesome organ we call skin has been demonized because rich old white men need to sell us makeup. They've actually convinced us that the only way to cultivate our own beauty is to resemble porcelain in texture as closely as possible. To become objects. To gently reflect light and stay quiet. 

Here, women are allowed to be imperfect--and to emote. Many of the photos feature leading ladies caught in an expressive moment, their faces stretched beyond the usual passive kitten-gaze that plasters women's magazines. So it's not just amusing to see Selena Gomez's goofy smile or Julia Roberts' tooth fillings or Kirsten Stewart's nose hairs (nose hairs! Who knew she had nose hairs??). It's actually incredibly important. The images on Celebrity Close-Up aren't framed in the same way that magazines frame their "celebrities without makeup" (the shock! the horror!) features.

We're not asked to balk at how horrible these people actually look without their usual masks. We're just asked to look a little closer at the images that bombard us on a daily basis. We're asked to remind ourselves that yeah, celebrities are people too. Even in their makeup, they're all delightfully human when stripped of the product around them and presented as just a detailed face. No context, no demands, just features shaped into an expression.