A Bleached Legacy
2018 · Typology
A Bleached Legacy was inspired by a close friend's experience of colourism within her family and community. During adolescence, she was pressured to use skin-bleaching products because her darker skin did not conform to the beauty ideals within parts of her family and community. She later began challenging these ideals and created a support platform for others affected by colourism. She is also one of the women photographed in the series.
The work draws on the history of the Brown Paper Bag Test, a practice associated with colour-based exclusion within Black communities in the United States, in which skin tone was compared with the colour of a brown paper bag. Accounts of the practice describe lighter skin as granting access to social spaces and opportunities from which darker-skinned people could be excluded.
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In the photographs, the women's faces are obscured by standardised brown paper bags. Across the series, however, it is the bags rather than the women that become increasingly bleached. The transformation of the paper reflects the pressure to alter darker skin in pursuit of an imposed ideal of beauty, and the psychological and physical harm this can cause.
The work draws on the history of the Brown Paper Bag Test, a practice associated with colour-based exclusion within Black communities in the United States, in which skin tone was compared with the colour of a brown paper bag. Accounts of the practice describe lighter skin as granting access to social spaces and opportunities from which darker-skinned people could be excluded.
In the photographs, the women's faces are obscured by standardised brown paper bags. Across the series, however, it is the bags rather than the women that become increasingly bleached. The transformation of the paper reflects the pressure to alter darker skin in pursuit of an imposed ideal of beauty, and the psychological and physical harm this can cause.