SITUATION #45

Thinspiration Mosaic consists of a series of portraits of young anorexic girls from Pro-Ana groups. These online communities advocate anorexia as a lifestyle and propagate eating disorders through a glorification of the emaciated female body. Laia Abril captured their visual language by taking photographs of the thousands of vernacular self-portraits shared by Pro-Ana members on their blogs and websites. In this act of re-photographing, the artist turns their bodies into an abstract landscape of compulsion and destruction. Devoid of individuality, they are transformed into a shocking document of our society’s obsession with control and self-optimisation. Part of a larger project on the topic, Thinspiration Mosaic questions the consequences of aesthetic and social standards that are imposed and reinforced by mediated images. The project reveals the complex economy of images that shape our ideas of beauty and definitions of gender, questioning the role of photography and its circulation in social networks.

More by Laia Abril: laiaabril.com