Julia Roberts smiles for the camera. Her head is slightly tilted. The left hand resting behind her neck is projecting an image of a woman comfortable in her body – a woman comfortable in her skin. The product that Julia Roberts is promoting in the advertisement for Lancôme is called Teint Miracle. And indeed, the…
Yurie Nagashima, Kazoku, 1993 In a previous blog post, I wrote about the photographer Yurie Nagashima whose photographs of herself and her family in the nude instigated a dramatic shift in Japanese visual culture. After exhibiting her phenomenally successful Kazoku series in 1993, Nagashima continued to interrogate photographic subjects related to gender, sexuality, representation and…
Advertising for perfumes, particularly perfumes by female celebrities, is produced with amazing visual consistency. A brief glance at a variety of ads shows that there appears to be a formula for celebrity perfume ads in American popular culture: the celebrity is photographically represented alongside the perfume she advertises which is usually shown on the bottom,…