A portrait of Celebrity Big Brother contestant Danielle Lloyd posing in her pageant dress and crown. Her face, just one of the many “wannabes” that cover the walls of the Gone Tomorrow Gallery’s new exhibition opening Saturday 2 June by photographer Ivan Jones.
Sometimes touching, sometimes provocative, Jones’ formal portraits of beauty pageant entrants at live events , sit alongside those of contestants photographed in their own homes. From behind the scenes of regional heats, through to the crowning moments of the final contest – an accumulation of 3 years research and documentation, this exhibition lays bare the often unglamorous reality of what was once a mainstream event that attracted over 50 million viewers during its heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
It is this reversal in popularity that attracted Jones to the pageant scene,
“I look at this as anthropology of an underground event. The lack of mainstream support for the pageant scene has seen it become a bizarre sub-culture.”
Jones is fascinated with the contrast of events such as Miss UK whose popularity has dwindled, with mainstream TV shows such as the X Factor which parade young hopefuls before the public, often with equally exploitative formats.
It would be easy for Jones to labour a point, to align this work with a particular discourse, yet like all truly good documentarians, Jones seeks objectivity – he leaves us the viewer to come up with our own appraisals of this problematic subject area.
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