PHOTOGRAPHS: PHILIP SINDEN, © PENNY SLINGER, COURTESY RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY, LONDON, AND BLUM AND POE, LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK AND TOKYO, © PENELOPE SLINGER, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2019, YVES SAINT LAURENT/3DETAILS, GETTY IMAGESEDITOR’S LETTER
Above: Penny Slinger’s
‘Rose Colored
Spectacle’ (page 260)and after the great American author’s recent death at the age of 88, I found myself
returning to her words again, and reconsidering their meaning. There are myriad
individual interpretations of what is beautiful – and therein lies the magical,
mysterious alchemy between author and reader, artist and onlooker – and one’s
response to particular stories or images can evolve over a lifetime. (What I believed
to be exquisitely romantic as a teenager – in Wuthering Heights, for example – now
seems far more disturbing.) But the idea of creating beauty, as well as beholding it, is
endlessly intriguing, and remains at the heart of Harper’s Bazaar, just as it has been
f rom t he ma g a zine’s launch in 1867.
Hence our varied portfolio of artists and writers exploring the subject in this issue;
and their inspiring and moving creative responses. ‘Beauty to me is not about
perfection, it’s about awkwardness, strangeness, difference,’ observes the Turner
Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, whose pair of self-portraits that we publish are
both concealing and revealing, with her masks and disguises. Alongside is Penny
Slinger, a pioneering feminist who has been challenging the norm since she
graduated from the Chelsea College of Arts in 1969. ‘Beauty is hope is the midst of
despair,’ she declares. ‘Beauty is petals falling in the snow and a rose that withers inSEEING &
BELIEV ING
‘Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do...’
So w rote Toni Mor r ison in The Bluest Eye, her first novel, published in 1970;