carl bower – chica barbie | burn magazine

The pageants of Colombia are a petri dish for examining the nature of beauty and how we cope with adversity.  Set against a backdrop of poverty, crime, and the hemisphere’s longest running civil war, nowhere are the contests more ubiquitous and revered than in Colombia.  In these carefully scripted shows of fantasy, beauty as a concept, commodity and singular goal is stripped to its raw elements.  There is no ambiguity or pretense that anything else matters.