Rock Your Ugly: Dubai-Based Photographer Waleed Shah’s Exploration of Body Insecurities
The world is on a mission to alter beauty standards. Dubai-based photographer, Waleed Shah, decided to share his physical insecurities along with many others as a means of group therapy.
“I was pretty uncomfortable with my belly, I took self-portrait and posted it on Instagram but didn’t really do anything about till the summer,” the artist explained in his blog.
“I read a book called “The Obesity Code”, applied it and dropped 10kg in 3 months. I had wanted to explore other people’s body insecurities since then but never got around to it until a few weeks ago when I lost my best friend to cancer and wanted something, anything, to get my mental state back on track,” Shah went on.
The Rock Your Ugly movement soon turned from sharing physical insecurities to deeper mental health issues. During his mission to peel off layers of buried traumas, the artist found that one of the most common issues were related to parenting.
The fear of accepting that your child is overweight due to a health issue, the social pressure of admitting that your child needs therapy or not giving children enough space to express themselves left most of the people he met scarred till adulthood.
Take a look at some of his most powerful features:
