© Ilona Szwarc
Los Angeles-based photographer Ilona Szwarc's recent book trilogy I am a Woman and I Feast on Memory; I am a Woman and I Play the Horror of My Flesh, and I am a Woman and I Cast No Shadow is a series of unsettling photographs using beauty tutorials as a metaphor for cultural assimilation. As a child, the Warsaw-native frequently visited the United States and wondered what it would be like to grow up as an American. When she moved to NYC as a young adult, she began using photography to help her understand this through two photographic series on the culture of American Girl dolls, and Rodeo Girls. While each project captured facets of American identity with a uniquely poetic, and consciously feminist lens, their representations only partially answered her youthful fascinations, they were made, as she acknowledges, by an outsider looking in. So, from 2014-2015, while working towards her MFA at Yale university, Szwarc turned her gaze inward and began making strange, theatrical photographs of her doppelgängers.
