Photoshopping Culture

I took a little twit on this assignment. I had difficulty thinking of and finding an image that has changed over time similar to those of my classmates, who found great examples (che gueverra, marilyn monroe, etc). The first image--or person for that matter, that came ot my mind was Britney Spears, and how the image she portrays to the public has drastically changed over time. This first image is the album cover for Britney's first album, "hit me baby one more time." The image illustrates exactly how the media portrayed Britney at the time--a teen princess who gave away just the right amount of sex appeal.






This second image is from about 5 years later-a time I would label the peak of Britney's career. Here, instead of being a teen princess, she has become a sex iconic goddess. She exudes sex, seduction, and rebellion in this photo. At this point in her career she moved from being a school girl to the rebellious queen of pop who ruled the music industry.





Here is an image of Britney after she shaved her head last year. This is the last phase of britney the media has portrayed thus far--the derranged britney. this image encompasses many photos of britney we see today, exuding pity, sadness, and shame from most viewers.



Lastly,
this is an image I created using adobe photoshop. I layered each of the above photos to create an image of the "collective britney."




While the photos I have chosen are not reincarnated images of each other, I do feel that the image of Britney Spears, like Marilyn Monroe, is iconic in itself. Everyone sees a different person when they see Britney Spears, and I have tried to connect these three personalities.

This year I am doing an independent study in Visual Arts called "Crafting Identity." My project focuses on the notions of craft, domesticity, and the women's rights movement through the context of a series of aprons that I am making. I looked at the above images in the research of my project. The first image is an advertisement I found in the 1944 magazine addition of "Home Companion"--a popular women's magazine at the time. The second image is a still shot of June Cleaver from the popular tv series "Leave it to Beaver" in the 1950s. The third image illustrates three young women in the present, and finally the fourth image is also from the present, illustrating a women in a pink checkered apron.

I chose these images because of the presence of the apron in each, and the different ways the apron is portrayed. In the first image the apron is seen as the appropriate uniform for a patriotic war bride waiting home patiently. In the second image, we see the apron on the quintessential domestic housewife June Cleaver. She is in the kitchen, symbolically "tied" to the kitchen by her apron. The three young women in the third image shows the transformation of the apron from a coverup in the kitchen to an elegant addition at a dinner party. Finally, the last image shows the apron as a seductive garment.

The images each depict the apron in a different way; it is fascinating to think about the context behind each image.

Response to Copyright Restrictions

The EFF, Creative Commons, and Archive.org are all non-profit organizations whose goals aim to deter from law restrictions on the web. The EEF defends free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights, "fighting for freedom" primarily in the courts." Creative Commons aims to reach the perfect balance of creative control in between total control and no control. Finally, Archive.org primarily targets researchers by providing permanent access to sources.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act" criminalized production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as DRM) and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself."(Wikipedia)

The EFF, Creative Commons, and Archive.org seem to fight against the DMCA, looking to a more open and fair use internet. I do think it is necessary to implement the DMCA, as seen in the article "Innovation, Piracy, and the Ethos of New Media," Microsoft said, 'the impact of piracy, in addition to causing higher prices,reduced levels of support, and delays in the funding and development of new products, harms all software publishers as welll as the local and national economies resulting in lost tax revenue and decreased employment.' Now this might be a tad extreme, but file-sharing is illegal--you are getting something for free when you should be paying for it. Yet it is hard to stand by this law--as I myself have guiltily downloaded for free instead of paying in the past. Individuals think that if you download one song here and there its not making a difference, but everyone is doing this, so it does in fact, make a difference.

The music industry has definitely pulled their reigns in the past years with mega law-suits against file sharers, who are mainly college students. Check out this article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48300-2005Apr12.html

I really enjoyed reading the graphic novel "Bound By Law." From a students perspective, you really gain the frustration of copyright restrictions in the problems the girl faces in producing her documentary.
I really agree with the mission statement of Creative Commons. There really needs to be a happy medium between all-or-nothing control. Fair-Use is extremely important--as seen in "Bound By Law."

So...creating this mashup took me a little over eight hours. No joke. I became obsessed with working on it from 5pm this afternoon till now, 1 am. I had a lot of trouble importing and exporting data rather than actually creating the video. For some reason Itunes wouldn't let me export the songs and video i wanted, so I had to find another way around it (i searched the internet for hours, made various copies of the files in different formats, but ultimately ended up downloading limewire, which i hate,to get the versions. I think my issues had something to do with my computer crash last week-not everything is running smoothly anymore. so after spending 6.99 on itunes for songs and video that i cant even export, i ended up using fuzzy choppy illegal versions. I spent forever trying to add text, but ultimately could never get it lined up right so i nixed all the text in the end.

but...

on a happier note...
these are two of my favorite songs, and I thought that since they are so similar, I would put them together in a mashup! you might recognize the song that comes first--Yael Naim's "new soul" (its the mac air commercial song with the computer in the envelope) the other song is "Fidelity" by Regina Spector. I tried to get the picture and music lined up, and spent a VERY long time editing the transitions.

I think i would have liked this assignment if one, i had better software, and two, i didnt get so stressed about having everything perfect. i would have saved myself a lot of time if i decided to just use different songs and video, but for some reason i was really stubborn and wouldnt quit till I found them.

maybe later on in the semester i'll have figured out how to have added text, and make the mashup exactly how i wanted it to look like.

mashup

I made this mashup as part of a graphic I'm going to use in a book i'm making for my independent study this semester in art. I combined three pictures of ladies wearing aprons to make it look like one fluid scene. The left image is from the popular tv series "Leave it to Beaver," the right photo is from a 1950s magazine ad in "Woman's Home Companion," and finally the image in the window is of a pioneer in the late 1800's. I wanted to portray the existence and cultural presence of aprons throughout time.

cmap

I created a cmap for some lit class notes i had.