Material Girls

From Melanie

In my photo entitled "Material Girls," I intended to depict what teenage girls are made to look at, and thereby compare themselves to, in their everyday lives. The collage of images I used all came from a recent issue of Seventeen magazine. When a young girl looks at these photos, with the words "makeover," "show off," and, my personal favorite, "IMPROVED!" scrawled on them, they may think that this is what they're supposed to look like. Seventeen prides themselves on showing that every girl is beautiful, which would be a great message- if it were true in its execution. However, showing images of celebrities in one picture labeled as "Oh No!" and another as "New & Improved!" completely contradicts the statement that the magazine is trying to make. In reality, this is only furthering the notion that how one looks to begin with is not good enough- That they need to change to be beautiful- "improved." The saturation of the majority of the photos is that of black and white, to show how these images blend into the background, as the "norm." Or, what is socially acceptable. The one photo with a heavy contrast and coloring in the upper right-hand corner depicts a girl that does not seem to fit in alongside the other photos. Another small aspect to the collage of images that may at first go unnoticed is the small set of figures in the lower left-hand corner, colored in pink and blue, representing women and men, respectively. The girl in the upper right-hand corner seems to be looking out, straight at the camera, and in this particular collage, I imagine her to be thinking, "Which figure do I look more like? Where do I fit in? Girls are supposed to look like this; guys like that. I simply don't fit."The vast majority of black and white images intends to show what the majority of teenage girls strive to look like, whereas the colored girl in the corner represents a large portion of the country, all stuck wondering, "Because I don't look like them, am I not beautiful?" The moral to the story here? Young girls are being taught through the media that, in order to be accepted, this is what a female should look like to be considered "beautiful." These girls don't want to look more like the masculine figure in the lower left-hand corner, as the brightly colored girl in the top corner does. That's just simply not feminine and beautiful, right?