Creative Project 1- Larisa Wade

For this project, I was thinking about the relationship between femininity and food. In American culture, the ideal woman is delicate. She has no appetite. The majority of women do not fit this ideal. For my project, I wanted to illustrate binge eating, a taboo behavior. My photos, which feature the same feminine, lipstick-coated mouth, show both an increase in eating intensity (from 'ideal' to binging) and a progression of mood (from cheerful and feminine to sickly and bad). I showed the progression of eating by making the manner of food consumption steadily more vulgar and the type and quantity of food steadily more caloric. I showed the deterioration of mood through the use of colored frames and the increasing coarseness of the subject's skin. The skin represents the woman and society's perception of her (crumbling) beauty. The images illustrate the guilt and negativity that many women experience when indulging in food. They use a woman's mouth, typically found in beauty photography, to show a female experience which is rarely depicted.