Cara Phillips

Cara Phillips was born in Detroit, MI. Her history with the beauty industry began as a child model for Ford Models. In her early twenties she worked as a make-up artist, specializing in ‘make-overs’ of  everyday women at luxury department stores. In 2004, she began studying photography at Sarah Lawrence College. Since graduating in 2007, she has focused on her own work and has collaborated on numerous projects. She is the co-founder of the online exhibition site, Women in Photography and a member of the  international photography photo group, Piece of Cake. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Suffolk  University Art Gallery in Boston, and group shows at the Colby-Sawyer College, Scope Art Fair Miami, Hous Projects, Randall Scott Gallery, Jen Bekman Gallery, and the Michael Mazzeo Gallery. Her work has been published in C Photo International, D’ la Repubblica, Cabinet and Allure Magazine among others. She has received numerous awards and is in several private collections. Cara lives and works in Brooklyn.

Her first body of work explored the psychological experience of the cosmetic surgeon’s office. In photographing the interiors of these places of beauty, she was able to create a visual representation of the emotions they invoked in her. While researching that project, Cara came across UV images of patients.  Many medi-spas and dermatologists take ultraviolet photographs to show patients their ‘future’ skin. Even though there is no guarantee that this unseen damage will ever appear, beauty professionals and doctors still use these images to sell treatments to their clients and patients.

Utilizing the same UV technology, but using B&W large format film, Cara set up her studio on the streets of New York City and photographed whoever was willing to sit in her chair. The idea was to offer pedestrians a chance to see their possible future and reconsider the fear of flaws that pervades our society. New York is known for having photo shoots on its streets, and for being the beauty capital of the world. But in this shoot every person who sat for a portrait, was given their moment under the lights. The results were surprising—however not so much for what they revealed about the subject’s skin damage—but for the questions they raised about the revelatory expectation of the photographic portrait.  What can a two-dimensional representation really capture about a person’s interior being? And in a culture populated by artifice, retouched images, scripted reality television, and set-up documentary art photography, how do we measure the truth of a photograph?