In Glorify Yourself, the camera captures my physical interactions with a beauty and charm guide that proliferated widely in the US during the 1940s and 50s. With chapter names like “Inviting Lips” and “Be His Leading Lady,” Glorify Yourself tells female readers that they can better serve the men in their lives by practicing a set of exercises that will turn them into “better,” Hollywood version of themselves.
The book struck a chord with me; it felt familiar despite having reached the height of its popularity a generation before I was born. Dissecting it provided me with insight into the universe of desires and delusions that inform the world I inhabit. I began acting on these materials – putting my aging female body in the positions described in the book, and photographing myself interacting with the book’s pages, sometimes destroying them completely.
While editing the work, I sometimes noticed myself passing judgment on myself and wondered if this was a subconscious expression the very ideology I wanted to interrogate. So I kept going: employing humor, reversing gender-codes, exaggerating scale. This gave me space to befriend an aging body I would otherwise hesitate to care for. The project became a place to channel my frustration with the familiar and insipidly misogynist discourse it is named for, one in which the female body is an object to control, to coax, and to situate in its proper place.