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Ciara Emily Davies

The Cookham Moor Ghost, 2020

In the same area, on several occasions, a headless lady in a white dress has appeared, riding a white horse up Whyteladyes Lane. At Halloween, she is said to dismount and walk up Winter Hill

My work starts with a ghost story. This mini-series brings back to life the headless lady that walks the moor, who was reported to be recently seen on a Facebook post I saw.  The series presents a tale and explores ideas around reality and representation. 

A fashion model embodies the spirit of The Cookham Moor Lady, the dark fog swallows the surrounding landscape as she appears to walk back and forth.  Trapped in an endless loop, the ghost is supposed to roam the moor in an eternal narrative of dissatisfaction and doom.  In its execution, my work uses this legend to reflect on visual language of fashion and life style photography, with obvious reference to widely practiced retouching culture, and an all-too-often extreme manipulation technique practiced to turn women represented by them into apparitions of impossible beauty, rarely aligned with reality of breathing, living individuals.  

Whilst ghost stories rely on suspense of our disbelief to add some harmless flavour to local folklore, the retouching culture, as long as it keeps on repeating the unrealistic renditions of beauty, creates more serious, ugly consequences, with devastating impact on mental health and positive body image for billions of teenagers and women around the world.  The time is high for us to stop believing in these ghosts, for more contemporary brands, designers, art directors and beauty editors to recognise their power to break the spell of a heavy-handed retouching pen.

The tale of the Cookham Moor Ghost…

@ciaraemilyphotography