Collage (Tape, Magazine prints)
Throughout “On Publicity”, Berger discusses the phenomena of self-reflection within visual advertisements. Berger asserts that advertisements function to manipulate and convince the consumer that they can attain happiness and glamour in exchange for the price of the product. Advertisements work to do this by evoking envy in the consumer; advertisements use conventionally good looking subjects and insert them into various picturesque utopian settings like beaches, tropics, waterfalls, gardens etc. In “On Publicity” Berger states, “The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.”
For the response image, I used tape to collage various images from several Vogue Magazines. I chose images of advertisements that utilized scenic imagery to sell there product. The most predominate colors throughout the advertisements were green and blue because mot scenes were of greenery (grass, fields, gardens, etc.) and skies and water. I wanted to abstract these picturesque scenes to showcase the ubiquity as well as to remove them out of the context of advertising, turning it into something unrecognizable as an advertisement while still maintaining visual appeal.
