RM-WOSS-20321_David Cubby_0-10-2023-Rvsd-H.265 – FESCH.TV

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The High Malar, Beauty, and the Photograph
How twentieth century photographic aesthetic skewed our sense of beauty

Driven by an innate, extended physiological proprioception we ‘feel’ with our eyes and ‘touched’ in response, transforming ourselves into the embodiment of photograph. It may be that the model and viewer interchangeably aspire to become sealed as thin and close to a two-dimensional being as a three-dimensional object can physically be, like the page of a magazine or strip of film sealing the image and fixing the gaze both ways. “It seems to me that today all American women have high cheekbones, long graceful legs, delicate wrists and thin hands,” says Beaton… A generation ago nobody had high cheekbones. Now everybody has them. I don’t really understand how women manage to change their actual bone structure, but apparently, they do.” (British fashion photographer, Cecil Beaton, 1956). The zygomatic or malar bone shapes the prominence of the facial cheek, there appear no historical precedents within western culture of high cheekbones accepted as an essential characteristic of beauty prior the widespread advent of photography and movies. Nothing of the elevated malar until the development of early professional lighting within industrially nascent, monochromatic, fashion photography, glamorous movies, and commercial styling. At that modernizing moment, high cheekbones arrive in magazines, movies, salons, advertisements, and everyday conversation. Subsequently, facial features of the industrial era became refracted through studio lights and camera pentaprism casting a vacant photogenic gaze, deep large eyes, pale complexion, full lips, straight medium-sized nose, paired back oval ears, white teeth, long neck, almond-shaped visage, and high malar bound within symmetrical countenance.