1990's Teen Beauty Magazines Double Exposed
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1990's Teen Beauty Magazines Double Exposed
I'm not sure I had the words to express my teenage awareness of the problems of mainstream youth beauty magazines but I was able to create the images ...
A little while back, I shared with you that I had rediscovered a series of Georgia O’Keeffe double exposure photos that I’d created when I was in my late teens/ early twenties. At that same time, I also created a series of double exposure photography images utilizing teen magazines as the source material. I was an avid reader of teen magazines (Seventeen, Sassy, YM) but I was also an underground ‘zine reader who recognized the conformity, particularly of gender and beauty standards, of the mainstream teen magazines and the damage they could potentially due to a psyche. I’m not sure how many words I could put to that at the time, but these images say a lot I think.
Oh these images say so much. Growing up in the 70s, 80s I always found the page 3 girls uncomfortable but couldn’t quite articulate my way past the “it’s only a bit of fun” rhetoric
It is scary how much power those magazines have. I remember when everyone’s goal changed almost
overnight from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy. Health and genetics had nothing to do with who you should
look like.