MEDI 114 (Subverting Images: The Presentation)

Subverting Images

Representation of women in the media

Origins:

• A lot of our group for the prior project did work based on Twiggy.
• She was the first model to start off the skinny craze
• She is naturally this thin however nowadays most models go to great lengths to emulate this 

 The thin model debate:

•  As a new model at 15, Coco Rocha said she went to Singapore and lost 10 pounds in six weeks. When she returned to the U.S. she was so obsessed with food, she beat herself up over eating an apple.
• "I'll never forget the piece of advice I got from people in the industry when they saw my new body," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "They said, 'You need to lose more weight. The look this year is anorexia. We don't want you to be anorexic but that's what we want you to look like."
  
• Rocha is one of the few models to speak out about the issue, even as ultra-thin models find their way into pro-anorexia "Thinspiration" videos. The question isn't just about model health; it's about who will win the hearts and minds of the teenagers and young girls who look up to them.
• "Thin is going to be the ruling look until someone says, 'I want voluptuous,'" said Fish. "I don't know if that ever is going to come back."

 Ideas we had…

We had a lot of initial ideas about what to do. None of us liked the way women are portrayed in the media and found some shocking things when researching into the subject. Our Ideas are as follows:

•  Image of a model with bones exposed –to emphasize upon the thin look being unhealthy.
•  Image of a model in an out of context house wife situation –to show the unrealistic idea of beauty and irrelevance in day to day life.
• Image of a model peeling  layers of her skin away –to show that she is loosing herself in the quest for perfection.
•  Birth of Venus idea –To show the changing attitudes towards beauty.
•  The Iron maiden idea –which is the one we finally picked.   

Venus in detail:

•  For a long time we toyed with the idea of using the Birth of Venus as a basis for subversion.
• The Birth of Venus depicts a fairly curvy healthy looking woman that was obviously the idea of ideal beauty in that time.
•  We chose to pick a famous thin person that was iconized as perfect by the media and settled on Victoria Beckham
•  Although the image itself is good we were worried that it might not reflect the statement we wanted to make and may be pitched over the heads of some of the general public.
•  Although its good its just not shocking enough.  

Back to phase one:

•  We then had to pick a new idea and direction.
•  We did some more research and came up with the idea that it is torture for most women to achieve a skinny body.
• We found that anorexia and problems related to it were very common in the modeling world and also in the world at large with extreme cases of diets leaving women brain damaged
•  Women world wide are literally DYING to be thin.
•  "There is no torture that a woman would not endure to enhance her beauty” –Montagne   

Our final Idea:

• Our final idea is based on the quote “The resulting hallucination* materializes for women as something all to real. No longer just an idea, it becomes three-dimensional, incorporating within itself how women live and how they do not live: it becomes the iron Maiden”
•  * the beauty stereotype promoted by media = a hallucination
•  So we decided to use the iron maiden as we liked its imagery and symbolism. 

The Iron maiden:

• An iron maiden is a torture device, usually an iron cabinet, with a hinged front. It has a small closable opening so that the torturer can interrogate the victim and torture or kill a person by piercing the body with sharp objects (such as knives, spikes or nails), while he or she is forced to remain standing.
•  The condemned would bleed profusely and weaken slowly, eventually dying because of blood loss, or perhaps asphyxiation. It would be a very slow horrible death!
•  They were often used for religious conversion torture and we liked the metaphor of this since being thin is fast become religion like in and of itself with a very fanatical following. 

The final Image:

• The way it is styled looks slightly like a motivational poster and we liked this idea.
• We added the words “Dying to be thin?” as an extra statement
• We think it would work without the words but wanted to make it have that much more of  an impact.
• The model we used is an anorexic girl that is not a celebrity. We chose a normal person for the shock factor that this could be anyone however we feel its clear she is a model
• We also decided to crop the picture and open the iron maiden to draw the focus primarily towards the spikes.   

That is all the content of my groups presentation.