In class we are assigned a reading, and we read and annotate it for homework and post the response and pictures of the annotation here.
Photography: A Critical Introduction
By Liz Wells
Liz Wells discusses photography, its context, the stories that advertising pictures can tell, and how people respond to them. Her words are not many, but strong and thought provoking. One line that I felt was extremely interesting was when she was discussing fashion photography. She wrote, “We are presented with spectacles of beauty, (usually conventional), sensuality, eroticism and pleasure.” At first I understood this as an advertisements attempting to sell perfume with an ad of a naked woman on it. I had believed that the sensuality was an effort in attracting more men to sell to. But I was confused, isn’t perfume being sold to women and not men? I delved deeper in and realized how the ad is revealing such a twisted society intertwined underneath the mere image of perfume! Women’s self image has become so reliant on other people that women have actually become subject to [the trap of] ‘sex sells’. How could this have possibly happened? Is this a lack of confident feelings or does it stem from wanting to please men and others, that they are trying to sell to the women who are self conscious and want to be the beautiful, perfectly toned naked woman? When does it get to a point where one does not need nudity to sell perfume..
