Subverting Beauty: Adventures in Ad-Busting | CJ Briggs | Visual Literacy, Spring 2014
When I first read about culture jamming/ad busting, I knew I wanted to try it myself. I had other ideas for what to do first, such as jamming some of Juniata's own advertising to its prospective students, or comparing the portayal of women in male-centered and female-centered magazines and then jamming them. I think, in hindsight, it was too big a project: The first option relied on getting students involved (which, at the end of the year, wasn't appealing), and I threw out the latter option after going through my chosen magazine (the May 2014 Cosmopolitan)
At first I intended to make fun of ads, like so many examples of jamming do, but I quickly hit a snag with the ads I pulled from the magazine: I couldn't think of meaningful ways to make fun of them. I was at a loss for what to do. After my conference with my professor, I decided to switch to just changing the messages of the advertisements, focusing on positive messages. So many messages women get from the media are negative: You're not light enough, you're not thin enough, you look too old, you're not pretty enough. With those messages in mind, I chose six different types of beauty to impose onto six different advertisements: cultural, body-positive, natural, androgynous, older, and unique. By the time I'd made this decision, the cultural beauty image had already been made by Photoshopping hijab (headscarves) onto two celebrities in a makeup ad.
I wanted the form of the project to be a very short magazine. Similar to my decision to make the Berger/Arguing with Images response a children's picture book because the subject was children's toys, I intended for this project to take the form of a magazine because the subject is magazine advertisements. This could have been either a paper printout like the other response, or a website, where the images were loaded into a gallery. Ideally, the gallery would have had a Flash or jQuery plugin to allow for a page-turn effect, but Flash isn't the most accessible program, and I'm unfamiliar with jQuery. I ended up finding a layout on Wix, a website-making tool, that utilized a gallery with animated transitions. It allowed for two images to be shown at once, basically mimicking a magazine layout.
My goal with the images I chose and edited was to subvert the traditional notion of beauty that we have thanks to our culture and the media: the reliance on things like makeup, anti-aging serums, and weight-loss items, as well as what types of women are seen as beautiful. I wanted to show that we all have our own ways of being that are beautiful in their own right, and we don't need to conform to be happy.
All advertisements were taken from the May 2014 edition of Cosmopolitan magazine and are copyright their original companies. The images were altered solely for educational purposes.