Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Body/Comm Spring 2008 Beauty in Japan Workshop

It's that time again, when the students of Body/Comm make their visual anthropology inspired posters to illustrate the concept of beauty in Japan.

Students are instructed to bring in their own images of Japanese beauty from magazine advertisements or elsewhere.

The Instructor also supplies plenty of images from his own private stock of Japanese fashion magazines, along with glue, scissors and markers.

Students work in groups of 4 or 5 and have just over 30 minutes to complete their posters.

They are already well-versed in the area of Japanese beauty not only from their observations and class discussions, but from readings of various sources such as Spielvogel (2003) and Miller (2006).

A common theme this semester was that "fake" is beautiful; many posters highlighted various products and techniques to change or disguise body parts into being more beautiful.

Students presented their posters and explained how and why they used particular images. Once again there were many interesting posters based upon insightful anthropological observations. Click on each photo to see close-ups of the posters.

Click here and here to see posters from previous semesters.

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