Have a look at these images from a Bulgarian magazine photoshoot about beauty. They show a series of women with horrific injuries – black eyes, broken noses, and wounds to their necks and faces.
These shots have been labelled as ‘perverse’ and ‘troubling’ by domestic violence workers. But others have dismissed them as an attempt to shock that’s “hardly the first of its kind”.
The Daily Mail reports:
The magazine’s website, which is not restricted, displays the following warning under the first image, which appears on its homepage: ‘Recommended Parental Controls: pictures are not recommended for persons under 16 years. And for the faint hearted.’
One user wrote underneath: ‘To me this is amazing!! While some may think that this glamorizes violence, I think it makes you think outside of the square to what the photographer was trying to depict.”
But others claim the spread merely builds on a disturbingly vast history of mutilated women in fashion shoots.
Jezebel wrote:
It’s a given that fashion magazines — like other forms of mass media — often aim to shock. Because they like the attention. Because they like the ad dollars. Because they like the rebellious reputation that shocking us squares confers. But it’s still worthwhile to examine the means by which they achieve that shock value. It likes to think that it, in fact, leads those tastes. But much of the imagery the fashion industry uses to communicate its messages at best echoes and at worst reinforces some of the wider culture’s most negative ideas about women and girls.
Your thoughts?
