PRACTICAL: Photoshop Experiments

John Berger's Ways of Seeing includes a photo essay which highlights how women have been objectified through various media throughout history, including but not limited to classical painting and advertising. 

Images of women are displayed next to images of meat, showing how women's bodies are reduced to a product for consumption rather than a human being - though this isn't necessarily considered by viewers until it is really blatantly put together, which it what I have attempted to do here by layering meat over an image of a woman. 

Visually I'm really enjoying this (both images were sourced from google), as I think it gives the implication of muscle and flesh beneath the skin - like some of the sketches I had done. 

Re-appropriating photographs originally from lads magazines links to my dissertation as that basically centres round re-appropriating imagery that was intended for the male gaze. It links to feminist intervention, as I intend to make little inserts that could be slipped into a lads mag. 

Again I have been working with eye motifs, I think it's really fun, because just adding even one extra eye can disrupt a whole image. It turns the gaze back on the viewer.

This was a suggestion from someone, that the body just dissappears. While being totally weird I think this image also implies the erasure of elements of womanhood that go into creating the 'ideal' woman. 

I asked a few people what they think would make weird images as I feel like I was making really similar images over and over again, some of the suggestions included

• Vagina face
• Face vagina
• Tentacle
• The body beneath the clothes is just nothingness
• too many nipples but only on the boobs
• hand boobs
• nipples than open up like a star nose moles nose
• nipples that are toes
• boobs that are mirrors 

All of them I very much like the ideas of. I kind of thought 'these things aren't that weird' and then I realised the thoughts were definitely making me uncomfortable. 

These experiments are working but I need to start getting them into the context of the lads mag rather than just standalone pieces. Luckily I have purchased a magazine and intend to scan in and alter some of the sets of images from there.