Living in New York City has been a life-changing experience. Being a part of such a progressive atmosphere, I have been exposed to mind-opening, wonderful things that sparked something in me that I feel the need to spread. I have learned so much about embracing body positivity, embracing sex positivity, empowering women, and overall just living a happy, fun life. I wanted to bring these freedoms and ideas to a place that lacked them in order to promote the freedom to not only BE who you are, but also LOVE who you are. I wanted the shoot to connote confidence, bonding, beauty, support, strength, and fun.

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     In December of 2017, I returned to my hometown in Southern Maryland---a town that could be described as "conservative". I reached out to tons of strong, gorgeous women of all shapes, sizes, colors, identities, and sexualities. Five incredible women stepped up to explore outside of their comfort zones and absolutely own their beauty. And we had tons of fun doing it.

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     Tori's Secret Angels is a play on Victoria's Secret Angels (as you might have guessed). I chose this title for my gallery because though Victoria's Secret is seemingly making an effort to diversify their models, they aren't trying hard enough. Including a plus size woman or woman of color in every few ads of theirs to meet a quota is far from trying hard enough. There are never-ending variations of beauty that they lack in their advertisements, so I thought I would showcase it myself.

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     It was important to me that the models participated in this event in a way that made THEM feel beautiful and confident. Whether that meant modeling without shaving their legs, while wearing intense black makeup, while wearing NO makeup---models were encouraged to show up and rock it however they wanted. Feedback for every single photo was also given by the models. If they did not like how they looked in ANY photo, they were either cropped out or the photo was not used in order to preserve the confidence we had just cultivated. All models were 18+ and gave explicit permission to take and use these photos by signing a contract.

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     My hope is that I made a positive impact on my models' lives and maybe even viewers of the gallery. I hope newfound self-love was discovered that day. I would love to see people who live in similar places perform a project like this as well. If I could, I would travel all over the country and do hundreds of photoshoots just like this one. I encourage viewers to conduct a similar project, and if there's any chance that someone reading this does, please tag it with #TorisSecretAngels, because I would LOVE to see.

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Enjoy. All my love.

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                                                                  -------- Tori Kraese

                                                                     Artistic Director

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