Cara Phillips
www.cara-phillips.com
Before & After Room, Tribeca. 2006
Brown Consultation Chair, Beverly Hills. 2007
O.R., Century City. 2007
Liposuction Machine #37, Beverly Hills. 2007
White Consultation Bed, Washington DC. 2007
The Whisper, Washington DC. 2007
Implants, Upper East Side. 2008
White Consultation Chair, Upper East Side. 2006
Playboy Consultation Chair, Orange County. 2007
Anesthesia Machine #5, Century City. 2007
Cara Phillips
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Singular Beauty:
In 1907 Charles Miller wrote the first book on how to combat the signs of aging. The volume was largely dismissed by the mainstream medical community, which at the time disavowed the idea that cosmetic surgery could be used for anything other than correcting injury or deformity. But in the 1908 issue of the California State Journal of Medicine a prediction of the future of Cosmetic Surgery appears: “This small volume deals with an aspect of surgery remote from the interest of surgeons, but sooner or later featural surgery is destined to take its place as a recognized specialty.” This one time “quackery” has evolved into a 15 billion dollar-a-year industry in the United States. Why has it flourished? According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeon’s website, “Even a small change on the outside can create an extraordinary change on the inside, allowing an individuals self-confidence to flourish.” Cosmetic surgery is now a common part of our culture. However, when Miller published his landmark book, modern technology was just beginning to enable us to correct and enhance our bodies. Today there is a never-ending array of tools and machines to make us beautiful. When you enter the offices of Cosmetic Surgeons you not only discover the promise of happiness but also the fear, self-loathing, anxiety, and desire of millions of Americans.
In photographing these doctor’s offices, I not only developed my own visual language, but also in the words Susan Sontag made, “familiar things small, abstract, strange and much farther away.” The documentary photograph has a long and illustrious history, but today we are confronted with multiple realities, therefore portraying ‘truth’ in a photograph is made more complicated. When I make images, I am less interested in capturing the actual place or thing, than in capturing the experience of it. Because it is our emotions, which have the deepest impact on our intellects.
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