Artist Statement & Bio:

The woman in these 'before & after' photos walked into my neighbor's apartment in Paris one night looking as she does on the left. I asked if I could take her photo and she sheepishly obliged. I took off her glasses, tousled her hair, and angled her face toward a cheap Ikea lamp, then I told her to look at me like she hated me. The immediate result was the photo on the right, which has not been altered at all. When she saw the image on my camera screen, the sweet girl began bawling. She said, "I've never felt beautiful in my whole life until now...."

That was the moment I decided to focus on portrait photography.


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Paula Dixon is a Los Angeles-based fine art portrait photographer who studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles and the Spéos Institute of Photography in Paris. Her photographs (excluding Hipstamatics) are all shot with manual focus, shutter speed and aperture; they are never spot corrected or Photoshopped.

Instagram: @peoplepaula

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