Still Life

This is a guest blog by Alice Thomas - historian, lawyer, award-winning public speaker and baker extraordinaire, who also takes mighty fine photographs, but not usually of women in bikinis. She tweets as @AliceBThomas. Because that is her name.

It was a phenomenal day. But a less than generous photo.

If I could do one thing to improve British women's body image, I would ban cameras.  I'd have an amnesty, collect them all up, and melt them down – possibly to make a giant sculpture of a happy, scruffy woman.

Why? Because cameras are the main way that paparazzi, porn, and magazines – the three corners of the Bermuda triangle of a modern woman's self-esteem – filter into everyday life. It starts with airbrushed cover shots. Then there are the sweat-patches, spots and (whisper it) body hair all properly circled and captioned – “Eurgh! Disgusting!” – so women know what they have to be ashamed. Finally, there are the 25 shots of Imogen Thomas in a bikini, just to remind you that even if you get a few good pictures, someone will wait until you forget to suck it all in to snap another one. Famous women have to be unnaturally perfect from every angle all the time.

That shouldn't matter. Most of us aren't Angelina Jolie and even if the Imogen Thomases of this world clearly like having bikini shots taken, the rest of us aren't obliged to join in. But it does matter, because we are surrounded by cameras all the time. The camera on my phone has more megapixels than Lady Gaga has twitter followers, and any time I go out there are at least 30 photos on Facebook the next day. My experience seems to be pretty standard. The constant expectation that we will be photographed, along with the unrealistic expectations we have of those photographs, can seriously fuck with how we feel about ourselves.

The pressure to look photo-ready is starting to filter through to beauty advice. I was reading a blog post on a bridal site (don't ask) that suggested that even women who never wear makeup should get the full clown-face on their big day because otherwise they'll look 'washed out' and 'anaemic' in the photographs. There was nothing about feeling comfortable and being yourself on your wedding day. Brides just had to remember that if you can pull off full Essex Friday night warpaint and put up with the itching all day, you'll look great twenty years later in the photos.

The article that actually prompted this one, though, was a list of 'women's ideal bikini bodies' that  explained how most of the women in their photographs were actually underweight. Gwyneth Paltrow, the favourite bikini body on the list, is at risk from osteoporosis because her diet is so restrictive her bones are brittle. I remember thinking that my sister looks awesome in a bikini – she's all blonde and curvy with Christina-Hendricks skin – but if you look at photos of her, she looks chubby and pale. I reckon if I saw these 'ideal' bodies in real life, they would look like skeletons or children or bodybuilders.

I'm not trying to suggest that 'bodybuilder', or 'child', or even 'Essex warpaint' is a bad look if that's what a woman aims to look like all the time (I draw the line at 'skeleton'). It just seems that so much of what women do to their bodies and their faces is a response to the idea that the most important part of a night out or a holiday is the photos afterwards. We have been deluded into thinking that, since so much of our life is photographed, the photographs are life.

We should be living our lives for the 99% that's actually living, not the 1% that's stored on a memory card. In the real world, if you're a healthy weight, you get a bit of exercise, you don't live off cake (unless you're Mary Berry), and you don't think about how you might look on camera every second, you're pretty much doing fine. If we can't do that, maybe we should stop asking the women to get thinner or flatter or browner, and start asking Nikon to make more accurate cameras.