Image Analysis

Dolls symbolize perfection, glamour, fantasy and fulfillment. Barbie is always smiling, living her life in Malibu with her boyfriend Ken. She is also able to fulfill her dreams in any profession that she wants... But what if dolls were imperfect?

            In a photograph taken by Vivian Maier, a doll is shown in a trash can. The doll’s clothes are ripped and dirty. Its’ face has scratches and dirt on it. The doll is enclosed in the trash can. The doll is clearly imperfect. Who wants to love an imperfect doll? This question leads to the reason why we perform on social media the way we do. We fear not being loved. We fear being unwanted. We fear being alone. We fear being imperfect but we are indeed imperfect. It’s a hard reality to face because much like the imperfect doll enclosed by the trash can we are trapped by are imperfections. When I look at this photo I see us inside the trash can and everything outside of it as a society pushing us to be something we are not. We are the beautifully imperfect dolls trapped in a society that tells us how we should look, how we should act, and how we should think. Consequently, this enables incidents such as “catfishing” to happen. If Angela would have been completely honest from the beginning, would Nev had loved her for who she is? No. Nev was clearly looking for a woman that exemplified society’s standards of beauty. After all Megan is skinny, blonde, has light eyes, and is a professional model. Nev fell in love with Angela’s personality but Megan’s physical appearance. Because Angela knew this fact, she kept up her façade. 

Maddy Whittington

The Dove "Onslaught" Advertisements show us how powerful outside sources can be over women's thoughts about themselves. They trick women into thinking that you have to look like that, and you will look like that if you use their product. Women then look at these photos and buy their makeup to use as a shield to cover up their flaws and make themselves “perfect” like the women in the photographs. The company is trying to make us believe that in order to love yourself and be accepted they have to look perfect. That is why so many people hide their true selves because they have always been told if they have a flaw it needs to be covered up, and hidden. Advertisers also use technology as a shield to make their product flawless, but they are lying, to buyers, about the true ability their product holds. They try to make it seem like if you use their product it will make you perfect and desirable, which is a lie. The tactics of these companies have truly made women believe they are not

beautiful if they do not look like those models in the pictures. They then go fulfill their self-esteem issues through editing their pictures and lying about their lives online to make themselves feel wanted.

 

Transformations on the Screen

            In today’s society, it is not uncommon to run into multiple beauty advertisements as you are simply going through you everyday life. There are billboards on highways of flawless models with perfect hair, skin, and teeth, all telling you to “be like them and buy this product.” The beauty industry is sending out an unrealistic type of person and society has been conforming to make their idea of beauty, a standard for beauty. The beauty industry has greatly influenced the world in the sense that people are now taking new measures to fit their standards. One prevalent way is that people of all ages are editing their photos on Facebook or changing their identity as a whole. Many people edit their photo in some type of way. I am a victim of this; on the social media site Instagram, I put a filter on my photos in order to put a different lighting on my photos. Although it is a minute change to my photos, it still happens in order to make it more suitable for all my friends and family to see.

            Sometimes, people may even go as far as to change whom they are completely online. The movie Catfish told a story about when Nev Schulman was tricked online by Angela Wesselman. She pretended to be her daughter, Megan, who was around Nev’s age in order to talk to him, flirt with him, and eventually date him. It wasn’t until a few months in until he realized Megan was not who she said she was. One possible reason Angela did this was because she felt as though she wouldn’t be good enough for somebody if she was open about herself. She clearly thought it was easier to hide behind a screen because she never came out to Nev about who she truly was.

            I feel like there needs to be a new change in society. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is trying to initiate the change we need to see happen in society. Their goal is to make women feel beautiful and embrace themselves for who they are, not by what they could be if they give into beauty pressures. I fully support this change because it is not right of the beauty industry to make women feel insecure about themselves. Uniqueness is important in a culture; it sets everybody aside from one another and lets everybody be themselves.

Fake or real?

Between technology advancements like photo shop, fake profiles, and hiding in virtual games, technology has consumed our lives. We escape from reality and make our own virtual world to forget the bad in the world, even though the bad in the world challenges your good. We create fake profile to make ourselves feel better, but play with everyone’s emotions and fall in love with the person you are talking to, but you’re profile picture is not you. They fall in love with the idea of the person and not the actual person. Once you get caught and meet face to face, all of that changes and all that’s left is hate and betrayal from toying with their emotions. Also, all of the fake beauty created for this world, doesn’t help. It all ties together. Creating photos of people that are unobtainable to become, you make people want to run and hide to virtual worlds and create fake profiles to be loved. Technology has given us the opportunity to run and create the unobtainable and the virtually reality that we all hope at the end of the day are real. Technology makes issues and consumes us and we can never escape; It is an addiction and we never want to stop and we never will.

           

If Only She Knew

SL056 MW

The Onslaught campaign ad, made by Dove, a cosmetics company, ironically exposes the ways in which the beauty industry, through the use of media, has influenced society's perception of what beauty is. That has specially had an impact on how women view their aesthetics, since they're constantly being targeted by cosmetics companies and fashion brands to look and dress in certain ways. Not to abide by those beauty conventions is to live under the manufactured threat of being less than. In a frantic attempt to give this situation a solution, the ad ends with an appeal to parents [and I dare to say other family members, too] to talk to their daughters about beauty before the beauty industry, channeled through conventional and social media, does.

As for me, I have always meant to tell my once almost-girlfriend how beautiful she was. But as much as I wanted to, her child-like face glowing under the sunshine made me grow weak inside and concealed my words within my mind. Her countenance, a reflection of all I thought of her, kept me wondering night and day how one smile could weaken the knees of this brother and prevent me from walking any further.

Everyday, the anxiety of looking at her again filled my heart with gladness. As I contemplated the body in which she was wrapped up as a gift to the eyes of every observer, I couldn’t help but wonder how intricately designed she was.
Her smile, blooming from her eyes down to her mouth, gave a sneak peak into the story of one whose path was never short of trials yet, always exceeding in joy and love. She was someone I loved!

I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but I always thought it too obvious for her not to notice. To say she was pretty, I often thought, was an unnecessary redundancy, so I refrained from letting her know and avoided being called silly. “She surely knows how appreciative I am of her kindness and empathy. Should she not be aware of her own beauty?”

Apparently, though, to my shame and regret, it was never that obvious nor clear for her that what I appreciated in her body was what she already had. Little did I know that underneath her naturally gifted body, was a weak mind and a fragile soul, later held hostage like a will-less doll to every wave of opinions and beauty conventions.

So it was that day after day she started loving less of her unique attributes and as a marionette, she donated her limbs to the art of self-rejection that some have deceitfully called, fashion.

I, a once passionate appreciator of her beauty and a conscious observer of her character, could never grasp the grounds on which she stood in discontentment with her own appearance. So much was her inaptitude to accept herself as she had always been that she tried to correct her "imperfections" with pierced ears, shaded eyes, painted lips and dyed hair. All of this in an attempt to make herself worthy of care. If only she knew she already had what she was trying to attain. If only she knew I didn't care about her tangled and unbrushed hair. If only she knew that what she counted as physical flaws and imperfections were attributes that gained her everybody's admiration. If only she would remove the shades off her eyes to see her true beauty come alive... Maybe, just maybe, she would attest to the fact that one's true beauty is neither found in models nor in bottles.

Prompt 3 catfish

Before taking W131 this semester I was aware of the term “catfish”. I knew there was a TV series behind it but never caught any of the episodes (Catfish: The TV Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2498968/episodes?year=2012&ref_=tt_eps_yr_2012), not my thing, but anything MTV airs is bound to reach at least my ears at some point. I just didn’t go out of my way to check out the show, though. You know what I mean? Anyways, I was fairly surprised to find out we would be watching the movie from which the TV series is named after in our class film study. Simply called Catfish (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/?ref_=ttmd_md_nm), this film documents a heavily doctored and unauthentic relationship, between a filmmaker (Nev) and who he thought was a beautiful artist (Meagan), which was only possible with the existence of social networks. And one other reason.

Turns out, “Megan” doesn’t even exist. She was a creation of the internet along with several other profiles, spawned by Angela. Angela used her talent for painting, claiming it was the work of her young daughter-in-actual-existence, Abby. Nev ate up the artwork like a dog and its food bowl, he loved it. This left him vulnerable, easy to exploit, easy to fake date over the web by hiding behind images of other people.  As story goes along, Nev begins to notice the several inconsistencies in the bologna story that he consumed and thought tasted pretty good, until it came back up.  He realizes that Angela is just some distraught woman in Michigan, who does not match her online identity. She also doesn’t have a daughter named Megan who Nev developed a deep attachment for. Angela was Meg. Angela was a lot of people, but she wasn’t herself.  She was just unhappy. She acted out to escape herself and her reality because she desired to be someone else.  This is the second reason why her façade was able to take place.

The desire to be someone else is the result of the insidious consumer industry that has been ripping us off for far, far too long. Wanting nothing but our dollars, corporations will stop at no end to make sure you are spending your money. Even if it means your wellbeing is on the line. The Dove Beauty Pressure video is a perfect snapshot of the beauty industry and its relentless attack on your mind with ad campaign after ad campaign after ad campaign. These companies have perfected their advertising for decades and know exactly how to rewire your brain to think you need more. And for the unfortunate people who can’t always get more, they know how to make us very unhappy, like Angela. See Angela is a victim of the consumer industry. She, like all of us, is being bombarded with doctored ads featuring ultra-human models and other manipulative marketing techniques. Over time it has broken down her will to see the good in herself because she can’t match up with photoshopped models or run out and buy whatever she feels like. Being desperately unhappy, Angela needed a way to cope. Thus we have the art of castfishing.

Catfish

When most people hear the word catfish they think of the fish. Today the word has a new meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with amphibians. Now it means that someone, somewhere in the world is pretending to be some they are not. This all takes place while sitting in front of a computer screen or in the palm of your hand. The scary fact is that almost everyone has run across a fake account, whether they know it or not, on a social media website.

 In the movie Catfish, Nev is believed to be receiving papers from a little girl. He researches about her and the results he came up with were quite shocking. The little girl, Abby, did not like to paint. Instead, her mother, Angela, created a web of lies to wrap Nev up into all of it. She had him believe that he was in a relationship with Megan. The whole time Angela was pretending to be Megan and painting the pictures she claimed were Abby’s. Nev did some inspecting and finally unraveled it all.

The whole idea of catfishing is quite horrifying. To think that who someone is on social media isn’t who they are in real life is concerning. This leads to a whole slew of issues, primarily a lack of trust. In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle talks about how people often play video games and create the perfect self-image they would want for themselves. She interviews people and they talk about how everything is some much easier in the virtual world. They can have the perfect car, the perfect house, the perfect family, and the perfect job. They live out their dream life through a video game avatar. This is how I see a catfish. I think someone who performs a catfish is someone who wishes they could change themselves. They create a fake account and try to make that account perfect. They create a perfect fake name, create the perfect bio, and then they scope the internet for the perfect picture to wrap the whole account together. They then scope out the perfect target to play victim in their game of trying to improve themselves.

America in Color

Choosing images for this paper was hard. Throughout all of the sources, there were over a hundred (or at least it seemed) to choose from. Not to mention try to relate them to my topic of people having a second, online, mystery life. Picture number six in America in Color, titled ”Headlines posted in street-corner window of newspaper office”, was taken in Brockton, Massachusetts in December of 1940. It depicts a group of men, all wearing trench coats and fedoras. As I looked into the picture deeper, trying to really depict what its meaning is, I couldn’t help but notice a few things. One being how all of the men’s fedoras were all covering their eyes, almost as if they are hiding something. Another thing that stood out is that they are all looking in different directions. One of the men is also carrying what looks to be a package or parcel. Even though social media sites weren’t around in the 1940’s, I feel that this picture is very relatable to the topic of second identities. The men look as if they are trying to conceal their own identity. Could all of these men be living alternative lives? Another reason I choose this picture is because of the parcel in the man’s hand. It reminded me of the documentary. Abby (or should we say Angela) sent Niv numerous things in the mail, all concealed, both in reality and as a figure of speech. Angela used the packages as a way to draw Niv closer to her.

Puppet Master

In class we watched and discussed the documentary Catfish. The documentary follows a photographer Nev and the online friendship he makes with a little girl Abby through paintings she does of his photographs. Over a short period the two converse quiet frequently. Other characters come into play like a mom Angela and a potential love interest Megan. As time goes on and certain things don’t add up and Nev becomes suspicious and starts to investigate further. After a surprise trip to see the family he discovers that he is being lied to and all the relationships he makes are all fake and set up by the mom Angela. This brings us back to the points of roles being played online to keep up a certain image. This is instance Angela was the ultimate puppet master and role player. She made several different Facebook profiles for people she made up and acted in the roles of what those people would do and say. This was a way for her to let out what she lacked in life and wanted to be. She used the Internet to be a more acceptable and likeable version of herself. Although, her case is an extreme one it honestly doesn’t differ that much from all of our online presence. No matter what anyone says we all want to be liked. We may not be able to alter this likeableness in real life, but in the online world this is easily achievable. We can carefully play the role we think we should fill. We do this by posting certain statuses or by editing our pictures. We take pictures of us doing certain things with certain people in order to play a certain role. We then edit those pictures to give off a more likeable appearance. So, Angela might have taken hers to an extreme all at once, but how are we so much better then her? She was at least guilty about what she had done. Through out our daily lives we lie about who we truly are on a constant basis and think nothing of it. Why? Because we can and its now socially expectable to do so. We are all trying to be a better version of ourselves so we can come across more appealing and likeable to fit into the roles we think we must play. So, although Angela was the puppet master to many different avatars at least she knew what she was controlling. We on the other hand are the puppets and our master is social media. 

Prompt 3

"A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create a false identity, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances." This is the Urban Dictionary definition of a catfish. Have you ever known someone through Instagram, Facebook, or Tinder without actually meeting him or her face to face? Then, when you meet them, they look so much different in person. Sometimes, it might just be because they edit their pictures to the extreme. In other circumstances, yes, people actually use other people's photos, which they think are more attractive then themselves, and use them as their own to get more attention and/or affection. In my English W131 class, Professor Layden introduced us to the book, Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle. In the book, it talks a lot about robots and how people actually treat them as real humans. When advertised, it makes it seem as if these fake, robot dogs, actually have real feelings. People actually buy these fake dogs and robots and brainwash you into thinking that they can actually hear what you are saying and have real emotions and responses to it. I personally think this is absolutely crazy.  In the first image attached, it shows a robot dog. In the photo, you can see that the words “your REAL best friend,” note that the word real is capitalized. In my opinion, this doesn’t look like a real dog and I could not see myself treating it as if it was. Yes, it can walk, fetch, and react to your affection. My point is, if you break it in half, it is not actually going to feel any "real" pain. This goes to show that it has a false identity of being real. These dogs could be as fake as the person you are messaging on Facebook. 

Prompt 3 (Michael Mitchell)

Image Analysis: Dove "Eolution" Video

Shelbie Ezell

A person can basically change anything about their appearance at the click of a button.  You can look as if you lost 30 pounds, make yourself have thicker lips, clear complexion, change bone structure, and much more.  Online can make you question the authenticity of essentially anything.  In the Dove “Evolution” video, it shows a woman at the beginning that is completely natural.  Her hair is not done and she has no make-up on her face.  But as the short video continues, it shows a make-up artist that changes the appearance of the woman.  She undergoes her hair being made up and make-up to cover any blemishes or her overall natural beauty.  But the makeover does not end there.  A picture is taken of the woman and then put on the computer.  What we see after that is the woman changes completely.  She does not look the same in the end of what the Photoshop does to her.  Her neck is elongated and slimmer, her eyes become larger, her face becomes narrower, and the position of her eyes are changed.  Everything that changed is unrealistic.  She now has an unnatural beauty that shows the world what “beauty” should look like, which therefore gives women an unrealistic standard of how they should appear to the world.  These are standards that are impossible to accomplish, even undergoing plastic surgery could not make you look the way these women do that are edited with technology.  People are changing for the simple fact that they are wanting to impress others around them.  We have this sense that we should please others by the way we act and the way we appear.  Society shows people what image we should have.  Generally we are told that we should have this "perfect" image.  But if everyone looked the same, or had all of these perfect qualities, we would no longer be unique and one-of-a-kind individuals.  Therefore, people need to focus less on the models that they see in magazines, on billboards, on TV, or anywhere in general, and they should be focusing on what they see in themselves as beautiful.  Technology does not have to make us insecure with appearance.  We just have to realize that what we see online or in pictures, is not always as it truly is. 

Prompt 3

Silje Moen Skoglund

I chose to use the sources Catfish and the Dove videos along with Alone Together. 

Nev has a suspicion that this girl Meghan, he has been talking with might be a fake profile. Though he has also developed feelings for this girl, therefor he goes to figure out for sure if she is real or fake. Later in the movie this is confirmed, Angela is the painter and “Meghan” the girl Nev has spent nine months talking with and thinking this could really be something. He is also suspicious that Angela might be crushing on him and gotten emotionally involved as well. Angela wanted to create a life she never got but always dreamt of having. Her life was about taking care of her two stepsons with handicaps and her own daughter while also maintaining a home and painting. She was looking for a getaway, somewhere to escape and feel like she was something more or different. Therefor she used pictures of people she considered beautiful and pretending to be them, to feel better about herself and her own life.

            This all brings me back to confidence and the pressure; Dove has a video with a woman entering a room without makeup and only in basic clothes. Which could be to show the natural beauty of a woman, and then makeup is applied to the woman’s face. The transformation has started; makeup is something most women wear in our society, which is no big deal right? Though the transformation is not over quite yet. After this woman’s hair and face are all fixed up by makeup artists and hair professionals. The photographer takes the pictures, but these images will then later on be Photoshopped. The image that was originally taken will be twisted in to what is considered to be beautiful; the perfect lips, body, eyes and so on. The beauty goal is set to be an unrealistic measure by doing these changes with Photoshop; this could be what Dove is trying to say in their video. The images in beauty product commercials are unreachable for an ordinary person. This could be because even a model needs to be airbrushed with the help of technology to be what society considers beautiful. Yet, Dove is a part of the industry creating this beauty image. This is because beauty sells the unrealistic and unreachable goal, which makes consumers want to be beautiful and look like the models on TV. Every company has one main goal, which is to make the sale no matter what. To me Dove’s commercial seem to be another way of selling their product, to make them seem like the good guy in the industry.