Advertising photography created an idealized version of middle-class life that was always white, attractive, happy, and capable of reaching the next rung on the ladder to health, beauty, luxury, and success. In the late 1960s some of the race and gender biases of advertising were at last addressed. For all of photography's supposed realism and its power to make fantasy credible, the underlying strength of photography in advertisements lies in its ability to glorify — and glamorize — the object. A handful of cigarettes can be made to look like the most beautiful, precious and desirable objects in the world. A car can be presented as the symbol of a "lifestyle," the very object needed to prove one's entrance into the world of the rich, stylish and sexy. Of course, photography can work both ways. It can make cigarettes attractive. But it can also help create images that turn people away from cigarettes, by using fashion-model looks as the lure for an ad that warns against smoking. It is unlikely that people ever swallowed advertising claims whole. Yet even when an advertising photograph is recognized as a performance, it touches real wishes and anxieties and invites belief or wish fulfillment, at least subliminally. For those in search of identity, advertising offers a kind of pictorial windowshopping. The innumerable images show products that promise to create a new sense of self, and they do so with all the brilliance and conviction photography can offer. Seeing through the photographic sales pitch may not be that difficult — but resisting it can be. |
