Elliott

Beauty as a troubling of normality.

Pallas Mail • September 2025
 

Beauty, in these photographs, is not presented as decoration or harmony. It is not a quiet confirmation of what we already know. Instead, beauty here lives in tension — as a troubling of normality, a reminder that what feels stable is often fragile.

Each image confronts the viewer with the possibility that beauty is less about pleasing surfaces and more about what intrigues them. The camera becomes less a mirror than a lever, prying at the everyday and showing the cracks in its foundation.

This collaboration, and process, treat beauty as an indictment of the status quo. The photographs do not simply record — they implicate. They demand we ask: whose normality, whose stability, whose idea of order are we looking at? And what is being overlooked, suppressed, or erased in the name of that “normal”? Therein lies the dignity I've tried to capture here. 

 These images point forward, toward possibilities not yet fully realized but urgently needed. They insist that beauty can be a compass, guiding us toward what is yet to come, and toward ways of seeing and being that break free of inherited frames.

These images symbolize beauty not as comfort, but as friction; not as affirmation, but as critique; not as static, but as becoming.