AD BUSTER

For this assignment I bought the October issue of Vogue and looked at the advertisements. I had originally saw the left page of this full spread Louis Vuitton ad on the back of a page I torn out and realized the ad was all about material. Leather car seats, leather hand bag, matching leather gloves and boot, and animal fur (the dog). The right page contributed as the model is wearing fake(?) snake or alligator skin and his holding another dog.  Small dogs have become an accessory for women to carry around in their large handbags, dressing it with designer clothes and jewel collars. This seems silly to me as I believe dogs should be able to play and run around free of extra baggage. This ad doesn’t address dogs as accessories to adorn with material things because they aren’t even wearing a collar. They aren’t in a carrier, they aren’t seat belted in. The woman’s boot on the left page is at the same level of the dog, the handbag is shown above the dog, suggestive that dogs are lower, not really expressing that dogs are a joy. Therefore I see this ad using dogs as material(fur) to represent the high quality materials that Louis Vuitton offers.  I included PETA in the ad buster slogan because this ad doesn’t exactly comply with their motto of, Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, and abuse in anyway.  Their motto is subjective, however this Louis Vuitton ad is using dogs for entertainment at the dogs expense because the dogs are in a car with no protection of a carrier or a seat belt, not wearing a collar in case they get lost, and the hidden message that Louis Vuitton provides high quality goods to wear.

Body Project



For the body project I wanted to address profiling and stereotyping. When we are submerged in the public sphere we naturally look, compare or profile the people who surround us. Cultural cues from television, movies, family values, or peers gives us the ‘labels’ we use to profile these people when you never know for sure the story of the person being stereotyped. To represent this idea I used found images from google images or flickr of people who I know nothing about and labeled them. I constructed these images as a Polaroid because polariods were instant photos that came out of the camera. Parallel, we instantly profile people and often disregard them and continue on with our day. The way I have labeled them is suppose to make the viewer think about the stereotype and the viewer’s reaction may be to disagree with some of the labels, but the point is that we don’t know for sure as they are found images.
            Using found images of people made me feel really uncomfortable because of the fact that I was giving them labels, labels may have not been true, and not crediting the photographer who shot the image. I feel that there needs to be media persuading the mass that profiling is suppose to feel uncomfortable as everyone is a person regardless of their lifestyle choices or nationality and heritage instead of comedy shows for example, laughing at ‘stereotypes.’