Cameron Russel won the “genetic lottery”. She’s tall, white and clear-skined: the embodiment of the standards of female beauty in American society. And yet she says: “I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, ‘Look I’ve received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor,’ and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, ‘and it doesn’t always make me happy.'”
She reminds us that pretty much all of the photos she’s in have been retouched: “These pictures are not pictures of me. They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. That’s not me.”