Our Collection

In Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s book Staring, she explains that people’s gazes are drawn to unusual or unexpected sights. Cognitively, this is how we learn about our surroundings and adjust our understanding of the world. This creates a complicated experience for people put in the position of receiving stares. Some make the choices that cause their appearance to draw visual attention, others have no choice, and yet others are able to up- or downplay this quality depending on context. Roger Lund’s analysis of 18th century writings, “Laughing at Cripples,” explains that, in the time before using those with unusual bodies for circus acts, people expressed a mix of discomfort and amusement toward those perceived to have “deformity.” A circus act tells us what bodies and visual traits were stigmatized and considered abnormal in the time and place of their performance. This allows us to draw conclusions about the definition of “normal” and about standards of beauty within the setting we’re observing. We hope that this collection allows a modern audience to examine the way they think of those they find “unusual,” and reflect ways it’s changed over time and ways it remains similar.

Our ideal audience doesn’t need to know anything about historical context, and we intend for the images to give insight into the constructs of beauty and tradition. The particular framing of a performer, shown in what they wore, their posture, and the language used to describe them, lets us consider which qualities made an audience view them as “wonderful,” that is, novel and abnormal. The idea of normal is malleable, and depends on the historical moment selected. We’ve chosen images that we think tell us a lot about beauty standards, including those with body modifications, people framed as “exotic’’ based on characteristics associated with ethnicity, anomalous bodies and faces, and abilities either related to physicality of the body or perceived pain tolerance.

Participation in a circus act is complex because while it places a performer in the position of being the object of an audience’s stares, it also serves as a source of income, and it gives a performer some level of control over how they are seen. Looking at past acts, we struggle to determine whether those in photos we examine were able to gain a sense of power from performing, and to what level their livelihoods were exploited by others.

Individual Reflections

The images our group chose stem from the concept of beauty, specifically exploring how it is seen and what can be said. From our collection, the visuals shown are forms of beauty modifications such as, but not limited to, clothing, accessories, extra limbs and hair. The physicality of the people in the pictures range from voluntary to involuntary modifications, which cause different reactions or opinions among people of what can be deemed beautiful now when the original point was to distinguish them as “freaks.” With this said, the very need, or desire, to analyze how the meaning of beauty translates into these images raises the question of “Why is beauty a thing in the first place?”