a moment as they imagine the place the photo directs them to. People take photos while they are on vacation or when they are having fun with their loved ones so that they can look back upon that moment and feel those feelings for as long as they have that photo. As Sontag says: “All such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality” (pg. 16). When we carry these photos and daydream back to those times, we ignite feelings and energies that we use to lift our spirits and appreciate what we have. Women are constantly objectified by advertising photographs. They present pressure to the woman to look unrealistic. In surveys, when women have been given different silhouettes of figures and asked which they’d prefer, 8 out of 10 women chose the figure of a 8 year old boy. These desires and expectations of an unrealistic body have to do with the advertising photographs in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue. When women read a beauty magazine, surveys have shown that after reading the magazine women are 30 percent more depressed with the way they look. In fashion magazines, the photographers present an unrealistic portrayal of women by not showing what goes on to make them look the way they do. As Susan Sontag says, “ . . . The camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses” (pg. 23). The photographer fails to show the models throwing up in the bathroom or the models smoking constantly to avoid eating. In my media arts class, they showed us a picture of Michelle Pfieffer with the caption saying “what Michelle Pfieffer needs is absolutely nothing” but in reality, that picture of Michelle needed 2000 dollars worth of airbrushing. This false description of what is going on with the production and making of the photo leads us in another direction. They want ...
