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Lauren Greenfield, born in 1966 in Boston, is a photographer, and documentary filmmaker, as well as a Chronicler of mainstream American culture. Her work has been published in New York Times, Time, Elle and American Photo. Greenfield states; “I am a documentarian, interested in sociological issues – but I'm not a passive observer, or a fly on the wall. My photography is artistic and intuitive, but with an anthropological perspective. When someone allows you to be in their space, it requires great trust. I aim to photograph moments that are not just about an individual, but speak for the culture we live in”
Greenfield is known for her project Girl Culture, which included observing the way in which consumer society affects the lives of women in America, and
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Portrayed through photographs of her shaving her arms, wearing lots of makeup, and jewelry as well as trying to make her breasts looks …show more content…
It is immediately noticeable that they all have blonde hair, of similar length, showing they are all conforming to the same ‘look.’ As well as all wearing similar style dresses, conveying their lack of originality. The girls are applying red/pink lipstick, to match their nails, which has promiscuous connotations, and is most daring for the young age of 13. As well as applying other makeup, and curling their hair to look, what they think is acceptable and hope to impress others. This image displays an ideal example of young girls priming themselves to look older than they are, complying with the expectations of culture and society. As well as their altered perception that they have to look a certain way to be beautiful, when really they were born beautiful, and should embrace
What woman doesn't want to be beautiful? Women want to please and will go to extreme measures to achieve the beauty ideal. Over the centuries, women have mauled and manipulated just about everybody part - lips, eyes, ears, waists, skulls, foreheads, stomachs, breasts and feet - that did not fit into the cookie-cutter ideal of a particular era's ideal of beauty and perfection. Women have suffered, sacrificed and punished themselves under the tyranny of beauty.
The media is a powerful tool and has the ability to influence and change one’s overall perspective of the world and the position they play in it. Although Television shows such as Friday Night Lights are seen as entertainment by consumers, its storyline contributes to the social construction of reality about class in the United States.
“The documentary tradition as a continually developing “record” that is made in so many ways, with different voices and vision, intents and concerns, and with each contributor, finally, needing to meet a personal text” (Coles 218). Coles writes “The Tradition: Fact and Fiction” and describes the process of documenting, and what it is to be a documentarian. He clearly explains through many examples and across disciplines that there is no “fact or fiction” but it is intertwined, all in the eye of the maker. The documentarian shows human actuality; they each design their own work to their own standards based on personal opinion, values, interest and whom they want the art to appeal to. Coles uses famous, well-known photographers such as Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans, who show the political angle in their documentations and the method of cropping in the process of making the photo capture exactly what the photographer wants the audience to view. In this paper I will use outside sources that support and expand on Coles ideas with focus on human actuality, the interiority of a photograph, and the emotional impact of cropping.
In our modern world, sociology has a tremendous impact on our culture, mainly through the processes and decisions we make everyday. For movies and television shows especially, sociological references are incorporated throughout the storyline. A movie which includes many sociological examples is Mean Girls. Mean Girls is a movie based on the life of home-schooled teenage girl, Cady Heron, who moves to the United States from Africa and is placed in a public school for the first time. Cady finds herself in many uncomfortable scenarios and has to deal with the trials and tribulations pertaining to everyday high school issues. Her experiences involve interacting with high school cliques, such as ‘the plastics’, weird high school teachers, relationships,
Additionally, Ariel Levy explains a personal experience that she had with GGW when they were filming on the beach. While the crew is filming, a blonde woman in a bikini wants to take a picture with Girls Gone Wild, but the crew and Mia Leist scream back “we don’t want pictures, we want boobs!” (Levy 15). The crew pressures the girl and her friend to take their clothes off. When people start to circle around the girls on the beach, Levy describes them as “seagulls sensing a family about to abandon their lunch” (16). As a result of Levy using figurative language to explain the behavior of the crowd, she effectively portrays the danger of the situation. An aggressive crowd, who is demanding that they remove their clothes, is cornering these young girls. Consequently, society has become enraged and concerned over the girls’ well being. After about forty people surround the girls, Levy says, “I caught myself hoping the crowd would not start throwing rocks at the girls if they decided the keep their clothes on” (Levy 16). Therefore, Levy proves how GGW inaccurately depicts the willingness of their participants to expose them on camera. By exposing the truth, Levy is hoping to anger her readers and encourage them to reconsider participating in or paying companies like GGW that benefit from commodifying women. Readers can see how raunch culture is influencing young women to do things that can potentially have long-lasting consequences. Levy discusses how one girl eventually took off her bathing suit: “The second girl rose up off her towel, listened to the cheers for a moment, and then spanked her friend to the rhythm of the hooting” (Levy 17). Once the girl’s clothes were off, her friend had no problem providing a little excit...
There is a group of people in the world today who are more persecuted than anyone else, but they are girls. Being born a girl means you are, more likely to be subjected to violence, disease, poverty and disadvantage than any other group on the planet. The documentary, I am a girl, directed by Rebecca Barry paints a picture of the reality of what it mean to be a girl in the twenty-first-century. I am a girl introduces us to six young women from all over the world. Katie is a wealthy, middle-class student from Australia getting ready for the exam, suffers from depression. Kimsey is a sex worker from Cambodia who supports her entire family. Manu is a Papua New Guinea villager whose unplanned pregnancy has put her in deep conflict with her traditional
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman grew up in suburban Huntington Beach on Long Island, the youngest of five children and had a regular American childhood. She was very self-involved, found of costumes, and given to spending hours at the mirror, playing with makeup (Schjeldahl 7). Cindy Sherman attended the state University College at Buffalo, New York, where she first started to create art in the medium of painting. During her college years, she painted self-portraits and realistic copies of images that she saw in photographs and magazines. Yet, she became less, and less interested in painting and became increasingly interested in conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, and film alternatives (Sherman 5). Sherman’s very first introductory photography class in college was a complete failure for she had difficulties with the technological aspects of making a print. After her disastrous first attempt in photography, Sherman discovered Contemporary Art, which had a profound and lasting effect on the rest of her artistic career (Thames and Hudson 1). Sherman’s first assignment in her photography class was to photograph something which gave her a problem, thus, Sherman chose to photograph her self naked. While this was difficult, she learned that having an idea was the most important factor in creating her art, not so much the technique that she used.
This phenomenon is known as self-objectification. Technically defined self-objectification is when we choose to evaluate ourselves based on appearance because that is how we believe others adjudicate us. The American Psychological Association has found in recent years that self-objectification has become a national epidemic and an international problem. The more women and girls self-objectify, the more likely they are to be depressed, to have eating disorders. They have lower confidence, lower ambition, and lower cognitive function. Most also suffer from body dysmorphic disorder, in which a person becomes obsessed with imaginary defects in their appearance. The scariest incarnation of this, turning women into objects, are the increasing numbers of women who are raped each
Feminism and political issues have always been centered on in the art world and artists like to take these ideas and stretch them beyond their true meanings. Female artists such as Hannah Höch, who thrived during the Dada movement in the 1920s in Germany and Barbara Kruger who was most successful during the 1980s to 1990s in the United States, both take these issues and present them in a way that forces the public to think about what they truly mean. Many of Kruger’s works close in on issues such as the female identity and in relation to politics she focuses on consumerism and power. Höch, like Kruger, also focuses on female identity but from the 1920s when feminism was a fairly new concept and like Kruger focuses on politics but focuses more on the issues of her time such as World War I. With the technique of photomontage, these two artists take outside images and put them together in a way that displays their true views on feminism and politics even though both are from different times and parts of the world.
A director is successful when they take the audience away from comfort and security. In the film American Beauty, director Sam Mendes effectively achieves this. Creating a sense of discomfort and insecurity throughout the film allows the viewer to have a more in depth knowledge of the underlying themes within the film. Mendes strips viewers away from a sense of comfort and security through the portrayal of a dysfunctional family and the use of aggressive verbal slurs.
Having a lack of self acceptance can cause men and women to spend a meaningless amount of time loathing on their imperfections, which can also degrade their self-perception on their bodies. Women who have a hard time looking at themselves in the mirror are in a constant battle with their inner demons, telling themselves that they are not beautiful enough. For example, in the article, "Out-of-Body Image" by Caroline Heldman, she says how, "[Women] are more likely to engage in "habitual body monitoring"-constantly thinking about how their bodies appear to the outside world . . ." (65). Women can spend a futile amount of time feeding negative comments to themselves about their appearance, which can heighten their chances of becoming bulimic and anorexic. Once women start to over-analyze their bodies, it can become difficult to reverse their mindset to generate positive feedback about themselves. Likewise, when men lose their confidence in their self-image, their self-perception can get misconstrued and suddenly they can only recognize their flaws. For example, in the article, "How Men Really Feel About Their Bodies," the author mentions how in general, men are in a constant competition against other males to improve their bodies so that they can survive in the male society ( Spiker, 73). Men are always under intense scrutiny regarding their bodies because they are engendered to be physically strong and built, and that is where the stigma begins in the male society. In order to sustain in the male domination, men are constantly trying to rebuild their bodies to match perfection. When men see others that are more built, their self-perception slowly starts to degrade their confidence, and that is when they have the difficulty of accepting themselves. As a result, men and women who lack self acceptance start to obsess over their
Like or not we live in a society that judge people based on their appearance. Thus people spend millions and millions on beauty parlors and plastic surgeries to improve their physical appearance.
I would like to begin with the fact that women have always been known to dedicate their time to beauty. Those who are devoted to their appearance most often believe that beauty brings power, popularity, and success. Women believe this, because they grow up reading magazines that picture beautiful women in successful environments; not to mention they are popular models and world famous individuals. Beautiful women are no longer just a priority for most advertising, but we have become a walking target for the working class employers. It is documented that better-looking attorneys earn more than others after five years of practice, which was an effect that grew with experience (Biddle, 172). We cannot overlook the fact that it is always the most popular and most beautiful girl who becomes homecoming-queen or prom-queen. While these are possible positive effects of the "beauty myth," the negative results of female devotion to beauty undercut this value. These effects are that it costs a lot of money, it costs a lot of time, and in the long run, it costs a lot of pain.
...y standards, further resulting in negative impacts on their self-esteem and confidence. Furthermore, this limited perspective of beauty causes women to be blinded and not realize that there is not one specific look of beautiful, but many. In a sense, women are taught to think that beautiful is being thin, having silky hair, toned legs, big breast, blemish and acne-free skin, and so on. However, in order to reach these beauty standards set by society, a woman can overwork her body in order to lose weight by dieting, or not eating to be “thin”, which also puts her health at risk and acts as an additional issue. Women who fail to reach these beauty standards set by society, may feel as though it is their fault and end up feeling even more insecure and bad about their body image, when in fact, the beauty standards were unrealistic and unattainable from the beginning.
Susan Bordo states in her article “Never Just Pictures”, that children grow up knowing that they can never be thin enough. They are thought that being fat is the worst thing ever. The ones responsible for this are the media, celebrities, models, and fashion designers. All of these factors play a big role on the development of the standard and how people view themselves. Everyone at one dreams about being the best they can in any aspect. But to achieve that most believe that one of the big factors is outer beauty. So people look at celebrities and fashion designers, and believe that to be accepted they have to look like them. That’s when they take drastic measures to change their appearance because they’ve been influenced by the Medias idea of “beautiful.” This feeling mostly happens in women but in recent years the gender gap has become smaller. Now men also feel the need to look good because of the media. On the TV, instead of having infomercials ...