Real life Barbie Doll

This article relates to what I have been commenting on about Barbie being seen as the ‘perfect’ women, with perfect hair, the perfect face and the perfect body. Valeria Lukyanova has been referred to as a ‘Real-life Barbie doll’ as she demonstrates an almost identical resemblance to the doll. At the young age of 21 she has clearly been strongly influenced to look like this, even though the article does not say the reason behind her choice to look like Barbie. The eerie images make the woman look like a plastic real life size doll but in fact it is a real person. The woman portrays in her appearance the desire to be ‘perfect’ by altering and changing her appearance to achieve this.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2133552/Valeria-Lukyanova-pictures-Real-life-Barbie-seeks-worlds-convincing-doll.html

The Girl with the 'Perfect' Face

“The 18-year-old student is blessed with what is described as the perfect face. It matches an international blueprint for the optimum ratio between eyes, mouth, forehead and chin, endowing her with flawless proportions” (Harris, 2012).

For many women it can be said that some search for the ‘perfect’ features by changing their appearance or using drastic measures such as cosmetic surgery to achieve this, but Florence Colgate apparently has these which match Leonardo Da Vinci’s blueprints of the ‘perfect’ face.  Demonstrating the near perfect eye, nose, face ratios that he describes as the perfect face.  In the article it describes how 8,000 women entered a competition to find the most 'beautiful natural face', which this girl won.  It made me think that people are so desperate to find out what ‘beauty’ really is and what it consists off, there are even competitions searching for these beautiful qualities.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2132896/Florence-Colgate-Girl-Britains-beautiful-face.html

Horst P. Horst Photography - 'Electric Beauty'

I came across this photograph in the photography book ‘Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre.’ This constituted of essays by Lori Pauli, Marta Weiss, Ann Thomas and Karen Henry.

Horst P. Horst images can be seen as similar to John Heartfield’s work, because they share similar backgrounds. Horst P. Horst’s photograph was produced in 1939 and John Heartfield’s was produced in 1930. They both originated from Germany and worked with photomontage’s, clearly trying to make a statement with their images, "socialist photographers like Heartfield use photomontage to make invisible social relations visible, advertisers have used montage to conceal 'reality" (Wells, 1997, p.179).  Horst photographed costumes for Salvador Dali and created ‘Electric Beauty,’ drawing on surrealistic ideas himself. This photograph (advertising) above shows a portrait of a woman who is undergoing a beauty treatment:

“her face covered by a heat mask with one small breathing hole. Electrical cords snake around her entire body, which she holds an electric nail buffer in one hand and steadies the overhead lamp with the other. One leg is lathered with hair-removing cream while her other foot rests in a tub of soapsuds. The analogy with the figures who animate the backdrop, a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony, is not all that far-fetched” (Wells, 1997, p.126).

What I interoperated from this photograph was that women feel the need to change themselves in order to find what is seen as ‘beautiful,’ where the woman (in the photograph) looks like she may accidently harm herself in order to achieve beauty. For example being strangled by the electrical cords or being electrocuted. I felt that this image related to my project and photographs because the woman’s face is also covered up and being suffocated by the beauty treatment, where the woman loses her identity. It also portrays the extremities women go to in order to achieve beauty.

Final Piece 2

In my photographs I want to show the suffocation and claustrophobia that some women may feel due to the media’s representation. This is shown by the images either being placed on the women’s face or appearing covering the girl completely.

For my second final piece I used a different technique from the previous photographic shoot. Instead of the arms placing the photographs on the women’s face, they just appear. I wanted to create a narrative within my final pieces. For example in this one I positioned the girl as if she had been flung on the floor and this is why her hair is spread over the background. This is to symbolise that she feels exhausted by the media’s representation of beauty and the standards that one has to try and live up to can be draining.



Towards the end of the video when the girls face starts to be covered completely by the images I created shadows to symbolise the pressure she feels suffocating her. The woman is not wearing a top to show her vulnerability and the images in the background show her blending into the background, losing her identity among the images of all the women.

Final Piece 1

This extract is taken form ‘Body Work: Beauty and Self-image in American Culture’ by Debrah Gimlin: “They control women by preoccupying them with efforts to change their inadequate appearances and by draining them of self-esteerm. Because standards for feminie beauty are inherently inconsistent and impossible to meet, women must struggle with bodies and appearances that ineviably fail to measure up.Yet many women focus enormous energy on molding their bodies into the closest possible approximataions of the female ideal” (Gimlin, 2000, p.17).

My photographic images are trying to suggest that a women may lose her ideneity because of the pressure she feels from the media’s representation of women, women who are beautiful and almost idealised. Making it hard or impossible for women to reach these standards. By the arms suddenly appearing from the sides and placing the images on her face where she does not fight back is to portray the media’s representation of women can be very powerful and influential on some women. I wanted to create an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia and suffocation by the images covering her whole face, whilst the girl does nothing.  This is to show the pressure that some women feel to change their apperance becuase they feel engulfed by what they see in magazines of other beautiful women.  Her eyes move from side to side creating an eerie feeling to the photograph that the girl is powerless to what is happening to her.

After learning from my mistakes from previous photographic shoots I made sure I did not make them again. For example no sleeves or braclets on the arms. I also decided this time to paint the hands finger nails red, because I wanted to portray how the meida can glamoroize beauty (red representing this). Using ‘beautiful’ models in magazines, can make some women feel the need to confrom to these ideals. I also decided to make the girl move her eyes from side to side in panic, because the arms are covering up her face with images of other women. I am very happy with the final image and there is clearly now a stronger narrative than from the previous photographic shoots.

John Heartfield Photography

John Heartfield was an innovator of photomontage in the 1920s and 1930s. He worked in Germany and Czechoslovakia between the two world wars. “The impact of Heartfield's images was so great that they helped transform photomontage into a powerful form of mass communication… Photomontage allowed Heartfield to create loaded and politically contentious images. To compose his works, he chose recognizable press photographs of politicians or events from the mainstream illustrated press. He then disassembled and rearranged these images to radically alter their meaning” (The J. Paul Getty Museum).

The photograph below “was a staged photograph rather than a proper photomontage. To create it, Heartfield covered a mannequin's head with pages from two newspapers, Vorwärts (Forward) and Tempo. As a result, the figure is literally blinded by the prejudices of these newspapers. The blurring at the left reinforces the idea of impaired vision” (The J. Paul Getty Museum).
I feel that this photograph related to my images, foremost because it has symbolic meaning behind it. The way in which the newspapers ‘blind’ the mannequin remind me of my images where the magazine cuttings ‘suffocate’ the women, covering her face completely.  The person in John Heartfield's photograph and the women in my images lose their identity.  There is also a feel of suffocation in his photograph not only from the newspapers covering his face but also from the strap across his chest constricting him.

Pixilation

Throughout my project I have been experimenting with making pixilation animation’s, which is a stop motion technique.  I have achieved this in my videos by using hundreds of photographs which are then put together to look like a film.  Below are some examples I found that use the same technique.  The reason that I decided to use this stop motion technique was to bring my images to life, to show in time, in this moment how some women feel beacuse of the pressure the media exerts.  Above are my final pieces that show this.

Her Mornin Elegance - Yuval and Merav Nathan 

Sledgehammer - Peter Gabriel