In this particular series of photos I wanted to focus on the sexual appeal of young women often fantasized about in erotic photography and pornography. It is meant to be a play upon the common scenario of naive teen having a sleep-over, and thus I chose to use a strong presence of "girly" colors (such as pinks and blues) and saturated them heavily to create an obvious tension with the viewer. I also used Photoshop to smooth-out my skin to create an unrealistic youth and used playful yet suggestive poses to highlight my message. I played around with creating a bit more of a setting with these photos, as someone during my last critique brought up how I should try to experiment with that more so than just consistently relying on a blankish background. In two of the five images I went in to Photoshop and added "make-up" meant to mimic that of a geishas. I did this visually to highlight the expression of the face. Conceptually, I was thinking about how geishas were, in Japanese culture, often young girls who would be sold off to sexually-please men. Often times, their customers would bid upon who would get to take the girl's virginity. I saw a parallel between this practice and the obsession with young, naive teens that runs rampant in the porn industry.
Your work is showing excellent progress, Kelly - I think it was a good choice to experiment with props and backgrounds, and that you worked with/exploited color extremely well with this group of images. Keep thinking about the discussion around the grotesque elements we discussed as a strategy to play around with to get at the issues of representation/objectification you are talking about with your work. The garish, bright colors are potentially functioning in that way - you just may need to push it a bit more, in a similar manner to how you've used goopy materials and certain types of make-up or costuming in the other images. Try also to think a bit about notions of the gaze in terms of facial expression and posturing - this could be a powerful area to explore. There is also an interesting difference in the images where you've (apparently) used a flash - as this flattens out the space and creates stark shadows. That might be a useful tool to think about as well. I think your image adjustments in Photoshop for the fine-tune image were excellent, and made a tremendous difference in terms of how that image is read. The inclusion of the magenta fringing, as well as of course the make-up, work really well.
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