Week3 Cut and paste experiments

Research images for starting cut and pastes

I have recently come across these composites which show the different ways people has split parts of the body in edits, which I could adopt in my images somehow.

So this week I have been doing cut and paste composites... The standpoint for the pieces is that the camera / photographer manipulates the women in these ads and the viewers it targets by the way the retouch the photographs to make the women look almost "perfect". My view is distopian because of the way the campaigns use false advertising and retouching. I think the work would be editorial because of the distopian view held. 

In this composite I have used the parts of a women that the magazines use to "seduce" the viewers. I have used the studio lights because of the nature of being exposed in these campaigns. The parts such as lips are hung from a camera to emphasise the control the mechanism of the camera and photographer has. 

I wanted to take the idea of identity being lost in this edit, so therefore cut out parts of skin as if it is breaking away. I then placed make-up brushes where this breaking apart existed, to emphasise that this nature of retouching causes damage to the viewpoint of women and there confidence. I have placed a camera lens in the eye to emphasise the control of the camera, however I am unsure of the place of the camera. 

In this edit I wanted to emphasise the way these women become like cyborgs because of the way they  become "perfect" when photographers retouch there look and if we were all perfect we would all be the same. 

This is a drawing I have done responding to these cut and paste experiments on what I want to do in Photoshop, this then might spark some more ideas and edits. I want to use advertising campaigns, especially skin care ads because of the nature of perfect skin they try to achieve through retouching. I will cut the faces into mask like shapes, and find a way to get the faces looking more fake. I will then use the idea of the skin breaking off from the masks, to emphasis a loss of identity through the falseness of these campaigns. I want to use metal rods/ cables which will hang the masks down from maybe a camera, to give the impression of a puppet like state which these women get in.