Personal Photo - Body

            After learning about the use of the body in photography, I decided to create a photographic series exploring models and their use of the body.  Clearly, most models are extremely, sometimes even scary, skinny.  Models have most “average” women’s ideal body type.  These “average” women are constantly reminded of what they should look like by the media’s portrayal of this unnaturally thin model seen via various images.  These images can put stress and pressure on women to look like this. As the standard models are becoming more and more thin, women, especially young ones, have a strong desire to look like these models they strive to be.  Not only do men drool over the gorgeous models, but also their celebrity status and fairy-tale lifestyle is something most women yearn for.  Some women want to be so unnaturally thin, that they go through drastic effects, such as eating disorders, in order to maintain this unrealistic representation.  Through the use of celebrity-magazine images, I appropriated and arranged photographs while adding text to raise awareness of the body image problems that models create for the “average” woman. 

            For my first image, I cut out different parts of different model’s bodies and formed an entire new model.  I added the text “One and The Same” because I felt as if it validated my point that these models are more robotic than human.  Also, because they all look the same; slender, tall, and gorgeous, it made them less unique. This is also the same idea I used my second image.  In the next image, I chose to form a collage of model’s midsections only, which are obviously all unnaturally skinny. These images can be found so easily throughout all magazines, that it reinforces my theory that models cause women to want to achieve this “unattainable beauty.”  My last image compares a thin model to a plus-sized model, which is rarely seen in magazines.  The plus-size model is not overweight by any means and because she is considered fat, average women become more body-conscious. 

            In this project, I mostly used the idea of gaze, which is connected to the body in photography.  The gaze “implies the complex power relations that are a part of the acts of looking and being looked at.”  This idea is exactly what modeling is based on.  Although their bodies are extremely skinny and distracting from other parts, the gaze a model has portrays her high confidence level, which is something everybody wants to feel.  Another idea that interested me was fetishism, because models, and their bodies, are seen as an object of sexual desire.  Nancy Burson’s photographic representation in her First and Second Beauty Composites influenced me to explore the beautiful models, just as she did.  Although I believe that models provide unrealistic expectations to “average” women and cause body-image issues, I still look up to these gorgeous models; however, I understand that the images we see of these models can easily be altered and are not necessarily an accurate depiction of them.