Image Curation

One of the 7 tasks for this class is the image curation project. We had to, in groups, collect several images and organize them into a slideshow. These images had to represent visual culture. For this project I worked with Jennifer Kolenc. The first thing we did was brainstormed ideas about what our theme should be. We came up with several ideas, such as death, how women are portrayed, beauty, sex sells, and alcohol ads. They were all good ideas, but we decided to go with sex in alcohol ads. Once we had figured out our theme I started looking for pictures on the internet. It took me a while, but soon enough I had found enough ads to use in our slideshow. I then started to put the images in our slideshow. Once I had finished putting the images in, the two of us got together and went over everything else we were going to add to it. Jennifer, then saved the slideshow to her USB key and took it home to work on. She added some quotes, and did the final touch ups, such as slide transistions and timing, to make our slideshow the best it could be. We brought our slideshow to our next class and it was shown on the projector screen. Our slideshow represents how in today's society everything revolves around sex. Sex is used to sell everything, it is like people are obsessed with it. Companies will use any chance they get to use sex in their ads, because it sells their products. We just wanted to show how much and how inappropriate sex is being used in advertisements today. I, personally think that it has gone too far and some of the ads are way to visual for my liking. For example, who wants to see a man licking a women or a womens breast, that are just barely covered by limes. These are going to far, they are not leaving anything up to the imagination. And they are defintley inappropriate for young kids to see. But they see them because they are all over the place. Whether its TV, magazines, newspaper or billboards, kids are exposed to sex everyday of their lives. They are going to grow up thinking it is the norm and then they will start dressing and acting more sexually because that is what they know. The ads that we selected for our slideshow all display sex and sexuality. I found it really amazing to see how many alcohol companies use sex in their advertisements. An over whelming number of them do, and thats only alcohol companies. I can't imagine how many other companies use sex to sell their products. This world has become sex crazed, and so companies are using it to their advantage. From this project I learned how effective a visual image slideshow can be. Pictures are very strong and can tell better story than words. All you need is a good picture to get your point across.