Everything They Did to Themselves
Hannah is twenty years old. She’s had her lips filled, her breasts augmented, botox injected into her forehead, fat removed from her body, and her nose reshaped. Five procedures before she can legally rent a car in most US states. When I first read through Michelle Sank’s documentation of her subjects, Hannah’s list hit differently from the others—not because it’s the longest, but because it reads like a checklist someone handed her.
Sank is a British photographer born in South Africa who spent time with young people unhappy enough with their bodies to do something permanent about it. The work doesn’t editorialize. It just looks. Jade, twenty, tattooed eyebrows and hair extensions. Shaye, twenty, a breast reduction. Ben, seventeen, shaving his legs and straightening his hair every morning. Jason, nineteen, building muscle the way some people build furniture—obsessively, because having something to show for it feels better than having nothing. Amy had her breasts augmented at eighteen. A different Hannah, seventeen, was already getting botox.
Some of this feels like self-expression. Some feels like damage. Most feels like both at once, which is probably the point. We grew up with every possible channel delivering the same message: you are insufficient. Magazines, television, school hallways, and then the internet at a scale that made all previous delivery mechanisms look quaint. France banned beauty pageants for children around the time these photographs were taken. The gesture was real but the problem wasn’t going anywhere. Elementary school kids were already turning up in eating disorder clinics. American parents were giving breast augmentations as graduation gifts. Marc Jacobs defended sending underage models down his runway because, he reasoned, child actors existed. The industry’s logic, applied to bodies.
What Sank’s series also holds are gender transitions—Jacke at eighteen, Cambell at sixteen transitioning from male to female, John at nineteen who transitioned and now lives gender-neutrally, Matt at eighteen going female to male, Jaye at twenty-five photographed before hers. These sit in the same frame as Olli’s anorexia and Nicola’s, and I find myself thinking about what that proximity implies—whether it flattens distinctions that matter, or whether it’s simply honest about shared territory: the body as a site of dispute between who you are and what the world expects to see.
Then there are the others. Saraya, liposuction and lip fillers at twenty. Abbey, lip fillers and implants at nineteen. Mike, twenty-two, waxed and implanted. Marta, twenty-four, filled lips. Ellie, twenty-one, tattooed. This cluster has a different texture from the gender transition entries—something that reads more purely like pressure, like capitulation. I can’t be certain which is which from outside, and that’s probably the most honest thing I can say about any of it.
The line between bowing to pressure and following your own voice is impossible to locate in anyone else’s choices. The world is loud enough that your internal signal gets interference, and that’s corrosive at forty and catastrophic at seventeen. Sank’s photographs don’t pass judgment, and I try to follow that. But looking at that second Hannah’s list—lips, breasts, forehead, fat, nose—I find I can’t stop trying to count what the mirror took from her.