Maddie Hepner

Does This FaceTune Make Me Look Fat?, 2019

Digital Inkjet Prints

In today’s technologically advancing society, photo editing, facial, and body touchup apps are ever growing with peoples developing social media and Internet presence. These easy-to-use, simplified applications allow one to reshape, reconfigure, and edit body and facial features to ones desire to enhance their appearance or completely modify what they look like. Rather than showcasing the real, true everyday experiences one has on social media, platforms such as Facebook and particularly Instagram have become a space for purely showcasing our ‘highlight reel’ and cutting the rest of the mundane aspects of life away. The photographic series of Does This FaceTune Make Me Look Fat? sheds light on the toxic aspects of these social media outlets while also showcasing humour in the body modifying photo editing applications. The series confronts self-perception, self-preservation, ‘artificial’ and ‘heightened’ beauty and exhibits the potential paths that female beauty standards may hold.