 "Photo: Leigh Lawson")
HSU alumna Lydia Hicks’ heart beats for two things: social justice and photography. She uses both in her art.
Since childhood, Hicks has been concerned with causes outside herself. At five she got stomachaches from worrying. She was anxious about the rainforest burning down, and about children starving. At seven, her mother came home and found her outside surrounded by piles of mashed-up grass and flowers. She was trying to invent pulp-less paper to save trees.
Hicks’ photography series “Naked Faces” displays photos of nude female bodies with faces painted on. All the photographs start below the neck and feature Hicks’ close friends. “[I picked models] from the availability of friends that would let me paint on their boobs.”
Eyes are painted on breasts, and feathers are used for lashes. ‘The eyes are the window to the soul,’ the proverb goes. Because people recognize other people by their face, the face typically represents the whole person. In American culture, outward appearances may be the most important representation of a person, said Hicks. By painting faces on bodies, Hicks wanted people to start questioning how we view others.
HSU’s Social Justice Summit this past Saturday was the first time she showed this series to the public.
Hicks, an ’07 graduate, was one of more than 30 presenters at the Social Justice Summit. The event focused on celebrating the strength of communities, and using art as a tool for activism. Different workshops ranged from celebrating different ethnic groups and their struggle for civil rights, to learning how to use photography, dance, radio, music and other mediums to move social justice forward.
Hicks’ seminar at the summit discussed how people feel about their bodies, what exterior beauty is, and where these ideas come from. She showed soap-company Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a series of commercials telling women their natural bodies are beautiful. One of these commercials shows people, one-by-one, wishing their appearance was different. Hicks said when she first saw this commercial she cried, because in the western world the hatred of our bodies is prolific.
One of the Dove videos shows the transformation of a woman, at first without makeup or styled hair, into a beauty model. The sped-up film shows every adjustment made to make the woman model-like, in seconds, though the many adjustments takes hours, if not days. Her image is then further altered in Photoshop before the photograph is used for a billboard ad.
Hicks says the media sells girls and boys a narrow ideal of beauty. “It makes you feel like you should not be in the body that you are in,” she said.
Social work junior Wendy Rostran said the skinny feminine ideal was highly publicized after WWII. The media showed images of beautiful fragile women, so they might concern themselves with their figures and not their careers.
Hicks has encountered this stereotype while looking for a job herself. In job interviews, interviewers told Hicks that she should change her hair to be in the TV or fashion industries. She related what interviewers said at the workshop. “‘Professional hair is straight hair. It’s not short and curly.”
Betsey Buchanon, a graduate in the education credential program, doesn’t use many beauty products. “Who I am as an individual is directly affected in my body, in what my body looks like.”
Buchanon said she earned every wrinkle and mark on her body because her experiences gave her the body she has now. She loves the ways her body changed having children. She says her daughter has encouraged her to dye her graying hair, but Buchanon won’t. “Just like I don’t regret anything I’ve done in life, I don’t regret any part of my body.”
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