CRIT

For my thesis, I am concentrating on the constructed beauty and false sexuality that is often associated with the female body, specifically in the realms of advertising and media. I will be integrating both elements of photography and graphic design into the final piece. I am planning on using myself as the model, and creating a series of three ads, which explore my ideas about this notion of constructed and somewhat inauthentic beauty. The emphasis won’t be so much on the product that is being sold but rather on who’s selling it. Everyone is familiar with the expression “sex sells”. Basically, I’m just trying to take this concept to another level where I’m almost mocking the idea but acknowledging it at the same time. Photoshop will definitely be a major tool in enhancing and exaggerating each photograph.

During my critique, I definitely received good feedback and advice. Although I have yet to shoot my photographs, I feel as if everyone pretty much got the idea from the work I posted up as an example. I feel as if everyone agreed that it should be in color, which would actually give it more of a commercial look. Although I was thinking of making each ad 18x24, someone had suggested that they felt it would be interesting to make them billboard size. Considering the project, I definitely feel it would make sense to make the ads large scale, however I’m not sure how that would work out with the amount of wall space in the gallery. So, most likely they will be slightly larger than 18x24, but not too huge.

The discussion then led to the question of how important the product is. At the time I had said that it didn’t really matter what the object was. However, I think that what I meant to say was, that it’s going to have to be something that we use on a daily basis, don’t pay much attention to or even something that’s simply disposable. The idea is to over sexualize the everyday and mundane. Someone had also suggested that instead of creating my own ads, I should just recreate existing ones. That’s probably the route that I’m going to go. Currently, I’m still deciding on the setup of each photograph. However, if anyone missed the critique, the image included in this post is what I showed last time in and is probably the best in exemplifying what the final project will look like.