Brea Saunders' 'Blue Women' Photo Book Documents Faded Beauty Ads in NYC and Beyond

Photographer Brea Saunders has released a new book, Blue Women, published by TBW Books, which surveys beauty advertisements and posters that have faded to blue over time in New York City and other global locations. The project began around 2023, when Saunders started paying closer attention to these posters, noting their mouths often disappeared while eyes remained, a detail she connected to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Over three years, she documented the posters in cities including Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul, San Francisco, Madrid, and several others, capturing their transformation as warmer ink tones degraded in the sun. The images, highly constructed ideals of femininity, become spectral and blue, revealing digital scaffolding and low-resolution origins. Saunders is interested in how these controlled images encounter uncontrollable forces like time, sunlight, and weather, and how their meaning becomes increasingly ambiguous. She photographs the posters in situ, leaving them to continue changing, and is drawn to the life of images—how they persist, mutate, and escape original intentions. The book is available to order now.