Shanna Allyn is Strange and Beautiful

When Shanna Allyn packed up her life in New York City a year ago, she left behind a life as an editor in television to pursue photographic arts in Minneapolis.

“I knew I wanted to do a series of portraits of women,” Allyn tells us of Strange Beautiful, the series she has since produced that is taking images of femininity and turning them on their beautiful heads, “I wanted the series to reflect metamorphosis, an evolution in society, in women, in men and how things shift and change. When I started, I had intentions of creating women that looked partially like dolls. As the series continues, the clothes come off and the eyes are exposed. The photographs progress into something different and a transition begins between man and woman. Woman begins to evolve into man and man evolves into woman.”

This gendered transition she speaks of occurs in Strange Beautiful’s fifth installment, in which the images of doll-like girls covered in mud, bruises and tattoos—often with parts of their bodies disguised significantly or “missing”—morph into ones of an androgynous man mirroring the gestures and expressions of a heavily made-up woman whose image alternates with his.

Allyn—whose artistic inspirations range from Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman to Lykke Li and Fiona Apple—hesitantly agrees with our reading of her work as feminist in their distortion of traditional beauty and subversion of the idea of what is “right” for a woman to be and do.

“It could be seen that way. I like to capture an understanding of being a woman and conveying that through a photograph or series of photographs that possibly other women can connect with. Men as well.”

See more from Strange Beautiful here.

Details

• Art by

  Shanna Allyn