Genie Kausto self-portrait
Identity

This Artist Uses Self-Portraiture to Rethink What Beauty Can Be

Photographer Genie Kausto shares colorful new work that takes inspiration “from the wrong places” and embraces stupidity.

This article appears in VICE Magazine's Stupid Issue, which is dedicated to the entertaining, goofy, and just plain dumb. It features stories celebrating ridiculous ideas, trends, and products; pieces arguing that unabashed stupidity can be a great part of life; and articles calling out the bad side of stupidity. Click HERE to subscribe to the print edition.

My work is a reaction to the mundane, sterilized, refined, and proper photographs that can be seen throughout most fashion magazines, beauty editorials, and marketing media. I’m driven by a frivolous and feral aim to rethink what “beauty” means. It’s a queer thing, obviously, to question or ignore the standards of beauty assigned to us. But it’s also a stupid thing, because I want to reject ideas that are thought-through, planned, restrained. I like to make work that is playful, that takes inspiration from the wrong places. To embrace stupidity is to refuse to conform to a particular type of professionalism, propriety, and pleasantness. I want it to look a bit wrong. Embracing wrongness is a way of ignoring life’s constant pressures to be right—I think that’s the appeal of the photographs in this series; that kind of debauched abandon.

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We often overthink how we look and how we dress. I want to present a world where these things matter less, where we can be more stupid about how we appear and enjoy it. If I think, I end up censoring myself, but if I think less, and if I embrace stupidity, then the pictures come out better.

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