SuicideGirls: Beauty Redefined [Hardcover]

Missy Suicide (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2008

Suicide Girls - Beauty Redefined explores the Suicide Girl phenomenon from their start in 2001 to their websites one million unique weekly visitors today. This giant tome provides a timely look at the fascinating women who created and inhabit the SG community. With an introduction by SG founder, Missy Suicide and images of hundreds of SuicideGirls world-wide, this title shines a light on a new female aesthetic - a look reminiscent of vintage Betty Page and Bunny Yeager photos, but with a decisively 21st century edge. "There's no other place in the media to see girls (like these) who are tremendously smart and beautiful in their own way" says Missy, "Everywhere you look you just see the super-thin, super-tall, bleach blonde Baywatch babe. There are a lot of people out there who want to see a different kind of beauty."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Combining her love of pin-up photography, music and art with personal ideals of female empowerment nurtured in DIY culture, Missy founded SuicideGirls as a place where a woman can be herself and where her confidence, creativity and uniqueness are what defines her. While it is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Missy found the camera lens of mainstream media a bit myopic for her taste. SuicideGirls began and has grown from a desire to expand mainstream culture's definition of what is beautiful, and to show that it can be realized in a more diverse range of women than those who grace the pages of most fashion magazines and movie posters. What started for Missy as personal expression has now become a revolution.

Raised in Portland, Oregon in what could be described as an eclectic and artistic environment, Missy combines her traditional fine arts training with new media business acumen in the operation of SuicideGirls. In addition, Missy continues to photograph women for the site. Her photography focuses on depicting how each model feels sexiest about themselves in the photos and has inspired a generation of young women to embrace their bodies and showcase their confidence.

Since launching SuicideGirls, Missy has become a voice for the culture on sexuality outside of what mainstream media is reporting. She has been interviewed on issues relating to music, the Internet, pop culture and body image on numerous radio stations and in publications such as the New York Times, Wired, Spin and Elle. Recently featured as one of the top "12 Sexiest Jobs in Hollywood" and the "20 Sexiest Jobs on the Web", Missy has appeared on HBO, Fox News, the new hit series "CSI: NY" on CBS, as well as the two SuicideGirls movies in constant rotation on Showtime. She hosts a weekly SuicideGirls talk radio show on LA's Indie 103.1 and was recently chosen to model as part of peta2's 2008 "Ink, Not Mink" celebrity, anti-fur ad campaign.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: AMMO Books; ILL edition (December 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934429163
• ISBN-13: 978-1934429167
• Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 11.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (109 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #103,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Arts & Photography > Photography > Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully crafted January 2, 2009

By Anarchie

Format:Hardcover

The first thing to strike you about this book is that it is size. It's huge and very heavy. The whole thing is just very tactile, with it's beautiful thick pages, filled with hundreds and hundreds of images of the Suicide Girls. Courtney Riot's design is subtle, but striking, and the photographed are presented in an artistic way that does not detract from their beauty.

What this book is lacking is the interesting snippits of journals and information that Suicide Girl's first book had. Aside from a brief introduction from Missy, and a description of all SG staff members, the book is lacking any text at all. If you are a subscriber to the SuicideGirls.com site you will realise what a shame this is, as the girls are as intelligent, and interesting as they are attractive.

My recommendation to you is that you are buying this book for a friend, be sure to include a gift subscription from the suicidegirls website, so they can get the full SG experience.

42 of 51 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars "Beauty Repackaged" is a more accurate title February 25, 2011

By D. Martin

Format:Hardcover

**BOOK IN GENERAL**
I was interested to see what the Suicide Girls mystique was all about so I purchased this book. For a little over an 11"x11" sized book at almost 400 pages and just over $20.00 this is a great value. The pictures come as full page, double pages, and when cropped, the pictures are still large enough to enjoy the detail. Cropping is usually done in a very non-intrusive way. You usually don't notice. The book is sectioned off (Chapters) geographically. The first five sections of ten are U.S. After that it's sectioned into other countries.

**CRITIQUE**
The book claims that it is beauty redefined. This claim falls far short of the mark. The photography is a sub-genre of glam/erotic photography. Its focus is girls with tattoos, colored hair, piercings, and unusual haircuts. The girls are most often in glam poses. If you said that it's slightly alternative playboy style photography, then it might not appeal in the same way. My hope was that it would show women in a different light, free of the conformity to established norms and mind numbing repetitiveness so often encountered with glam/erotic photography. I was disappointed.

The book only gives only a token offering of anything other than slender white women with medium to large breasts. There are very few Asian and Black women. There are a few women that in the modeling business would be considered plus size, but not large by society. Again, this is beauty repackaged to look alternative, claimed to be redefined, but in reality adheres to conformist societal guidelines of beauty. I wouldn't fault a picture book for displaying naked women, but its tag line is Beauty Redefined. I can't help but notice as I get further from my 20's that sub-cultures such as that represented by SG usually more stringently adhere to conformity and expulsion of individuality than that they seek to rebel against. When I was younger there was a certain charm to it. Now it just seems insulting to my intelligence. I enjoyed the tattooed/pierced girl photography, just the hollow attitude and social statement leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The book says that, "These images are our rejection of that Barbie Doll beauty ideal whose time has ended." Again, these aren't ugly women, they're Barbie Dolls with tattoos and colored hair. This doesn't in any way say to a woman that you can be beautiful if you don't fit the Barbie doll profile. It just says to a woman that if you're a Barbie Doll with the addition of tattoos, we think you're pretty. And the fact that the women are all naked with uninspired compositions with no socially relevant statement doesn't do anything to shatter the myth that women are much more than mute show pieces of meat that happen to have tattoos, piercings and colored hair. Again, I'm not faulting the images, just the hollow statement.

**PATICULARS**
Suicide Girls has been around since 2001. This book is dated as 2008. I can't help but notice far too many technical errors for a company whose main product is images. I don't think this books target demographic would notice the errors, but it's too frequent occurrence borders on amateurish. I won't fault a shot that's supposed to look like a snapshot, but when done because it is, that's sad. There are metering errors when shooting against backlit subjects. Exposures are hit and miss. It looks like too often they used a camera with a sensor/film too small to blow the shot to the size presented in the book or used a bad lenses. Often there are white balance issues, and not the artistic effect variety. The set compositions are uninspiring and lack creative thought.

**CONCLUSION**
I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. Technical errors were too abundant. Creativity was lacking in most shots. There was not much new or inspiring. What the book does right is present glamour photography with women tattooed, pierced and with unusual hair colors and haircuts. The book dimensions and price are great. It falls short as art, but is a nice picture book.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars eye candy January 15, 2009

By Lady Jinx

Format:Hardcover

Do You want a massive (6.5lbs) book that's full of amazing women? Since you're already on this page, I ask that assuming that you want to see women who are beautiful, sexy, and like nothing you will ever see in the pages of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. This book is 7 years worth of eye candy from a site that changed the face of web erotica remarkably and permanently, and did indeed redefine beauty in that genre. It's only a matter of time before "Suicidegirl" is a word in the dictionary.

Someone asked me when this book came out "How can they say 'Redefining Beauty' when all of the girls in the book are attractive?"

uhm... precisely.