Combating Weapons
of Mass Perfection
Sarit Z Rogers
I ran from the time I was a teenager, trying with all of my might to create space in a world that felt devoid of love and acceptance. I ran on treadmills and streets showered in the orange glow of sodium vapor light. I spent time in a squat with “friends” whose drug use and drinking was tantamount to my inner voice—out of control and abusive. I didn’t think I was worth more; I was told at a young age that I was a mistake. I wanted to be anything but who I was. I wanted to be invisible because I felt invisible. Perfection, self-delusion, and self-hate fueled my internal dialogue and was fed by my anger and shame. Fortunately, I eventually learned to stop and pause. I learned to lean into my shadow and look at it as something that required my compassion. I gave space to my suffering and through that, I discovered I suffered less. I learned to speak kindly to myself and show love to my inner bully. I realized that the desire to be someone or something else was a delusion that kept me away from celebrating the woman I am: strong, resilient, capable, and loving. When I discovered that I could look at ED (my eating disorder) in meditation and say, “ED, I forgive you,” I found freedom. When I discovered the wisdom and peace in child’s pose or the fierce strength of a revolved warrior, I became liberated on my mat. When I took all of this and applied it to my photography, there was an internal paradigm shift that propelled me to move toward breaking the limiting rules of perfection and creating spaces of inclusion, acceptance, nonjudgment, and love.
When we seek perfection, we subscribe to the message that we have to shift from our authentic selves to meet the expectations of how others would like us to be. Or rather, how the normative culture expects us to be. As a child, I was repeatedly told I wasn’t good enough, hearing things like: “You’re not normal,” “You’re fat,” “You’re a failure,” “You were a mistake.” The list goes on but the message is the same: I was not what was wanted or expected. I now know that none of what was said was true, but I lived my life believing the lies for more years than I care to count. I starved myself, trying to become invisible; I cut myself, trying to feel; I used drugs and alcohol to medicate myself from the internalized pain and suffering that was overwhelming me.
When I was fifteen, I was photographed and thought I’d try my hand at modeling. At around seventeen, I was photographed in a Downtown Los Angeles Loft in order to create a modeling portfolio. I was told to be “sexy” and “alluring.” I was seventeen, what did I really know about looking sexy and alluring? To add to my discomfort, I was naked in a borrowed bathrobe as I “suggestively” leaned forward toward the lens. I felt vulnerable and awkward. I wasn’t in my body at all. When I left, I didn’t feel sexy or empowered. I felt insecure, uncomfortable, worried, and discouraged. When I saw the images, I was shocked to see the perspective of the photographer and how the end result was something that was in direct opposition to how I felt—they looked sexy and alluring, despite my internal experience. This was film, not digital imagery, so the art of photography was different at this time: light and shadow were the paintbrushes and the subject was the canvas. We burned and dodged light onto our images in the darkroom, creating the illusion that artists like Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts made famous.
Shopping my portfolio around, I received a consistent message: “Sweetie, you have the face to go to Paris, but you’re too short and your boobs are too big.” I was confused (I saw print models like Isabella Rossellini who I thought was stunning and who people told me I resembled—dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin, ethnic); it made me angry—what was wrong with being busty and short? I had been fighting to raise awareness around race and inequality since I was in high school. I wrote speeches and debated about the horrors of apartheid, yet I also carried deep shame around my own cultural roots and spent years hiding my Jewishness as a direct result of experiencing hate speech directed at me. I never looked like everyone else, and the rejection from the modeling industry slammed the nail in the coffin: I really wasn’t enough. This gave me something to protest and fight about.
I experienced my disappointment by internalizing it. The message I received was an echo of the negative messaging I heard in my childhood: “You’re not normal,” “You’re a failure.” Having it confirmed by an industry that perpetuates perfection and competition and yet defines our pop cultural norms felt like the ultimate slam. I starved myself further—I cut, I burned, I measured, I smoked, I drank, I screamed, I fought.
I Need Help
What I needed was help from my internalized trauma, abandonment, anxiety, depression, and self-harming and addictive behavior. In high school, I had sought out therapy that was provided by my school. I asked for help at sixteen. I knew I was in trouble. At seventeen, I got sober through a program called Palmer Drug Abuse Program (PDAP), where I went to meetings. I broke up with my heroin-addicted, violent boyfriend and got my first job in the film industry, where I worked as a costumer for almost a decade. I had an insider’s view of this industry I was so angry at. Things were different with moving cameras though, all of I sudden I found myself roller-skating in a bikini for some crazy B-movie. Turns out I was miserable in front of the camera, still battling the violent internal dialogue of “you’re not really pretty enough or tall enough or thin enough.”
As a youth, I played with sun salutations on the Santa Monica beach, saluting the sun at sunset. I remember “knees, chest, chin” in the sand, feeling my feet caress the ground beneath me, and the ocean breeze on my skin. I remember feeling whole in those moments, however brief they were. I wish I had continued to practice, but I didn’t. I didn’t come back to yoga until I got pregnant with my son. My body remembered the asanas, but it took time for me to get my mind to let go. I still avoided public classes because I felt like I didn’t “fit in,” I wasn’t flexible enough or thin enough. I used tapes until they wore out. But I was lacking in the community that yoga represented. It took years for me to come to my mat in public, but when I did, that is when my healing began to take place. I had a profound shift in my self-perception. It was in those communal spaces where I felt supported by community and able to lean into the unwinding of my heart. I learned to cry without judgment, fall without judgment, laugh with abandon, and I remembered how to dance.
Growing into My Activist Feet
I was five when I first saw an image come to life in the dark, chemical-laden space of the darkroom. I remember the sense of fascination I felt as it emerged. We had a darkroom in our home and it quickly became a space of solitude, curiosity, and emotional safety. I learned that once inside, there was a peaceful, methodical practice of technical and artistic savvy. This isn’t where my activist brain was ignited, however.
I became increasingly disturbed by the injustices I saw in the world at large. I spoke out loudly, in the voice of someone who had just discovered how unjust the world was—there was self-righteous anger, which I later discovered is a legitimate part of an activist’s growth process! I then focused my lens on my immediate surroundings, becoming more and more aware of the injustices close to home. Anti-Semitism was already something I faced. “Dirty Jew,” “kike,” et cetera, crashed upon my heart since my youth, coupled with the issues around my name and the pervasive question, “What are you?” The rage stayed with me for years, but it wasn’t particularly useful in terms of effecting change of any kind. I just looked like an asshole, if I’m honest.
As I “grew up,” so did my activism. Putting myself through Santa Monica College’s photography program, I found my visual voice through creating conceptual imagery and in capturing realistic depictions of musicians by honoring their humanity. I photographed my first series on medium format film with my beloved Hasselblad and printed everything by hand. It was partly my desire to control the outcome of the image, maintaining its authenticity, and also part and parcel to my internal discovery of my own creative voice.
I repeatedly pushed the envelope when it came to “embracing” Photoshop and Lightroom. I remember sitting in my Advanced Photoshop class bereft at the idea of “fixing” someone’s face because it “didn’t look right.” At one point, I was told I wouldn’t succeed if I didn’t embrace Photoshop or the digital world like everyone else. Clearly, that rubbish didn’t stop me from pushing forward.
The truth is, I have embraced Photoshop in some ways while tossing its pervasively harmful characteristics to the side. Photography is a lie. Photographers are trained to play with light to create shadows and highlights that celebrate our fine features, while hiding our “undesirable” features. Reality is important to me, and I reveled in the masters before me who celebrated reality and frowned upon such things as even cropping images to make them “look better.” I’m talking about the greats like Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston, who founded the F-64 group that demanded reality and truth in photography. They believed that “photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium.” This is a foundational piece for me in my personal work and my published work. I do crop, but I make every effort to keep it real and authentic and accessible.
I hear fashion photographers and retouchers state that hairlines need to be lowered; I find that silly and absurd. What’s wrong with the beautiful hairline you’re born with? I don’t want to be part of the problem that’s created when we shift our outsides to satisfy a marketing team or pop culture media paradigm. I seek to guide people toward self-acceptance and self-love. That’s no easy feat—we are all subject to the blasts of perfection through social media.
Visual Conversation and Collaboration
I view photography as a visual conversation. As a writer, I knew I could communicate well with language, but as a photographer, communicating in a visual albeit two-dimensional way was different. I started to intuit fear and nervousness in my photographic subjects as soon as they stepped in front of my camera; I often saw sadness in the moments when I was purportedly not looking. I realized there was a divide—a bridge of communication that not only needed to be built but also needed to be nurtured from the ground up. The inherent judgment and objectification seen in photography had to be squashed. A shift needed to happen.
My camera is an extension of me, but to illustrate that, I have to lay a foundation of trust and safety before I photograph someone. Creating trust and safety and cultivating awareness is another way for me to lean into my yoga practice. Often times, I find myself putting my camera down entirely. Each person’s needs are unique to them, and I have found that my ability to pause and attune is what allows me to sense what is happening underneath the surface. In order to cultivate trust, it is vital for me to recognize each person’s humanity and remove judgment. I see you. I hear you. I respect you. Without that, there is no trust, there is no connection, and there is no photograph, and there is no yoga.
Yoga is where the rubber meets the road for me. It is where I can discover the felt sense—the embodiment of our sensory, energetic, and emotional landscape, by using my breath to bring awareness to the connection of my mind and body. Yoga gives me the freedom to show up just as I am: short arms, large breasts, and strong legs, tired or awake. I honor my body on my mat: what do I need, not what should I look like. As a result, this practice flows into all aspects of my life. Photography is an extension of my practice, as is parenting or being a friend or simply being human. What doesn’t fit anymore is the false idea of perfection. In the Oxford Dictionary, perfection is defined as “the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects,” or a “person or thing perceived as the embodiment of perfection.” 20 But I ask you, how is this possible? Don’t we all contain flaws? Don’t we all contain imperfections? And what if those flaws really aren’t something to be changed? For example, what if my short arms are left alone in an image instead of being stretched to look elegant and long? What if I stop pushing my arms to stretch beyond their capacity and use a strap to lengthen them in a yoga pose? If we don’t find a way to accommodate ourselves in our practice, we aren’t doing yoga; we aren’t meeting ourselves where we are. Instead, we are reaching for where we are not. Likewise, in meditation, finding safety on the cushion is just as pertinent. If closing our eyes places us in the trap of a trauma flashback, we have to allow ourselves the freedom and the grace to open our eyes. There is simply not a perfect way to do a pose or to sit. Perfection is a delusion we are trying to seize to increase our sense of pleasure and satisfy our greed. To shift this paradigm of desire for the impossible means accepting where we are, as we are.
My photographic process is imbued with the dharmic practices, which lead me to create by the dharmic truths of metta (loving-kindness), sangha (community), muditta (sympathetic joy), karuna (compassion), and upekkha (equanimity). I need to be grounded in my own truth and awareness if I want someone to be grounded in theirs. The camera is merely a tool to capture this awareness in a moment. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who birthed street photography, was also the one who coined the phrase and spoke about certainty of “the decisive moment” in photography. He said, “There is a moment where everything comes together in unison.” 21 He’s right; in each moment, there is the release of the breath, the dropping of the shoulders, the wave crashing at the right moment, the light caressing a cheek, or perhaps laughter. The moments are fast and changing. The practice is in rolling with that change.
Change Is Necessary
When I started photographing yogis, I was stunned to see the homogenized imagery that prevailed in all of the mainstream magazines. Here we had an East Indian, dharmic practice with the face of whiteness, youth, and hyper-flexibility as its poster child. In an effort to bring this practice to the West, the media was effectively whitewashing and “perfecting” the asana—commodifying the spiritual to make it digestible for the masses. Not only was this in direct contradiction to the practice itself, it is also fundamentally inaccessible. And despite being of a relatively normative size, I again didn’t see myself in these images. I was once again reminded that I wasn’t the desired image or “perfect” size. This is similar to my experiences from my youth, where I knew I had to look like some unattainable image to be desirable. Again, I saw height I didn’t have, a spine that moved in a way that mine didn’t, legs that were long and thin, and hair that was as blond as the skin was fair. I wasn’t seeing people of color, I wasn’t seeing rounder bodies, or “average” bodies, I wasn’t seeing differently abled bodies, or old bodies. I essentially wasn’t seeing the diverse range of reality and, in that way, it didn’t feel authentic.
I was seeing a false representation of something that is supposed to sell you and me the idea of getting “spiritually fit” through the mindful lift of your back leg to your head. The problem with that model of “perfection” is when we practice yoga and meditation and begin the process of leaning in, and when we meditate on our cushion or our mat, we are going to face our very real shadows—what I call “the time to pull on the mud boots and start slogging through.” Even though things get sticky and muddy, it’s what this practice is about. Those blasted shadows provide the cracks for the light to get in. Shadows are in the art we create, in that we are forced to sit with the uncomfortable or perhaps some past trauma or our self-doubt. Photography tends to bring this out because it forces us to be vulnerable. Since I am the one in control of the ultimate image, I choose to lean in with the person I’m photographing instead of plainly directing. That, in and of itself, lends itself to authenticity. This shadow work is essential; it is a very necessary part of creating art. It’s what leaning in and letting go is about.
Without the shadow, there is no light, and without light, there is no shadow.
I, too, am subject to the media barrage of self-hate and false perceptions. I see images of myself that don’t resemble me at all. I can see three reflections in a day, all from different mirrors, all looking back at me differently. Reality has to be what we make it. It has to be how we feel, not how we look. How we look will change. Our hair will fall grey, our waists may widen, our breasts and asses may eventually sag or broaden. But it’s our hearts—the resilient muscle that reviles negative reflection. The resilience and rhythmic beat pulls us back to ourselves, back to our truth, back to reality. Back to why we practice, why we lean in, why we take the risk to create art and capture moments in time and place.
When I am photographing someone or something, I am responsible. I hold in my hand a tool that captures moments in time; it captures joy and sadness, love and loss, depression and freedom, stillness and motion. But it is a long, phallic instrument directed toward my subject, placing them under observation and objectification. While I can’t stop that reality, I decide how I use that tool. I can shift it and lower the phallis to make the process equal and accessible. I can place my camera beneath our eyes; I can hand it to my collaborator and allow them to turn it on me. Here, the subject becomes a collaborator. The photographic process becomes a partnership. It’s tantamount to the partnership we cultivate with our breath on our mats or on our cushions. When I’m holding my breath, I can’t let go, I can’t lean in. When I fight my breath or push against it in a pose, how deep can I really go? When I take this dharmic practice and pair it with my camera, I allow myself to become a part of the healing process of leaning in and effecting change instead being part of the damaging problem of sameness.
My camera is not a weapon of mass perfection. Instead it is a conduit of change, a tool I use to make an offering and to find redemption from the lies we are forced to swallow when we open our media. Instead of using my camera to create something that forces beauty upon us, I use it as a tool to celebrate and encompass the beauty that already exists in each individual or group that I have the honor to photograph. I want to see people grow taller because they feel taller on the inside, not because I digitally elongated their legs in a computer program. I want to see those smile lines, because goddamn it, you earned them! You laughed and cried and expressed emotion to earn those beauties! This doesn’t mean I’m the anti-Photoshop, it just means that I have learned to use it for good instead of evil.
We are all “good enough” to be photographed. No, you don’t have to touch your toes to your head with a hyper real background to be beautiful. You simply are beautiful. I named my camera Artemis, goddess of the hunt and protector of women. I named my camera Artemis because I want to honor and protect our truth and our inner warrior that thrives on love and connection, respect, and being seen wholly and without judgment. She is not a weapon of mass perfection. She is a channel of love and respect.
Sarit Z Rogers is a Los Angeles–based photographer, writer, activist, and yogini. She is the founder of the LoveMore Movement and can be found at LoveMoreMovement.com and SaritPhotography.com. Author photo by Joseph Rogers III / Sarit Photography.