Photographers create weird portraits using magazine cutouts and real-life models

For as long as celebrities have come to define our standards of beauty, men and women have crowded into plastic surgeons’ offices wielding magazine cutouts of their favourite stars and requesting that the good doctors give them a “Kidman nose,” pecs like the action star du jour or a set of new lips to look like Angelina Jolie.

On a less physically invasive level, but a deeply invasive level nonetheless, many of us don’t even realize how deeply this current runs through our own perceptions of beauty.

Now, a pair of French photographers have embarked on a project to bring this realization to the forefront. Bruno Metra and Lawrence Jeanson wanted to highlight the ridiculousness of coveting a body part or the way so many people spend their life feeling inadequate because they don’t measure up to the airbrushed ideals they see in magazines.

To achieve this task, they cut out certain features of supermodels and celebrities from glossy magazines – a mascaraed eye here, a set of lacquered lips there – taped these random features on the real-life faces of ordinary people, and photographed the result.

If you find the finished product to be both ridiculous and a little creepy, that’s the point.

“In the media, we are bombarded by images of others. It is an otherness that is inaccessible, an image imposed on us, from which we feel powerless to escape,” the photographers write on their website.

“The laws of appearance drive us, in fact, to shape our own image to the point of transformation,” they add. “Beauty is no longer natural, but rather socially conditioned. The act of representation seems to have taken over what is real. The edit is what counts most. And so models erase themselves in order to gain another self.”

The Daily Mail notes that the photographers invited participants into their studio to complete the series. The first batch, called ID 1, can be viewed in its entirety here.

The project proved so successful that the duo has embarked on a second series, ID 2. In this series, the models are photographed in a bedroom setting to show how the tentacles of this identity obsession can reach us even in our most private spaces.

Click through the slideshow below to see more of the photographs. What do you think of the project? Sound off in the comments section.