Joanne Perry

AS Media Studies

Photo Options

I took this picture after researching various anorexia websites and infor-mation in order to discover what would be a most effective and verisimilitude approach upon the illness. Eating Dis-orders are stereotypically presented within girls and skinny people. There-fore in order to represent this ideology in order to appeal to the audience I felt it is best to use girls within my photos who are perceived as skinny. The tape measure presents the girl to be mea-suring her waist and therefore repre-sents the continuous struggle to be skinnier. I have also used a black and white effect on this image in order to create a more effective approach in or-der to allow the audience to feel sym-pathetic for the girl in the photo. Her loose grip on the tape measure also represents her loss of control in order to represent the impact in which the ill-ness can have on a person.

This photo is similar to the previous im-age however, instead of using a tape measure, the girls hand is positioned in a grabbing motion upon her stomach. This shows to the audience that the girl still sees herself as ‘fat’ due to her grabbing her stomach in a hatred manor. The black and white effect again represents an effective, emo-tional impact for the audience to feel when looking at the image. The image is a connotation of a girl suffering in si-lence and fighting a constant battle against herself, distressed due to her weight.

This image has been created in a poly-semic concept in order for it to speak to people, mainly niche audiences who are aware of how the girl in the image is feeling. The image shows a sign of how the girl feels everyday and her struggle with her eating disorder. The image represents a verisimilitude ap-proach to how silent sufferers feel in their own minds. The words ‘NOT

GOOD ENOUGH’ anchor the audience in due to the powerful context of the illness. The black and white effect outlines the words clearly and effectively, creating more emotion within the image for the audi-ence to feel when they view it. The clear wide shot of the girls stomach, represents how skinny the girl is and how she still does not feel that it is good enough. It represents eating disorders to be and endless loop of being not good enough unless re-covery is invoked.

This image I have taken uses an over the shoulder shot in order to allow the audience to have a verisimilitude perspective on how the girl in the im-age feels. The expression the girl invokes repre-sents her sadness and desperation to lose weight. Her hands, clutching her stomach, represent the de-termination and also the disgust in which she feels with herself and her body. This image is very power-ful due to it allowing the audience to see her expres-sion and emphasises sympathy for the girl due to her uncontrollable illness. The black and white effect represents her dark thoughts and emotions running through her mind as she stares appalled at her own body.

I took this image in order to represent various sce-narios in which occurs throughout an eating disor-der. It represents a different type of eating disorder which is regularly, Bulimia Nervosa, in order to rep-resent that my charity campaign supports all types of

eating disorders and not just Anorexia Nervosa. This allows more of a mass audience onto the charity campaign website. This also gives off a stereotypical girl with an eating disorder, trying vari-ous ways in order to make herself lose weight. The black and white effect is empowering due to the ideological denotation of a girl in need of help, creating sympathy for the audience and allows a more emotional effect to take over.

I chose to take an image of a girl with her hand covering her mouth in order to represent her feelings of insecurity and helplessness. The image represents her cry for help although she can’t. This leaves the audience curious as to why she can’t. This could be for a large vari-ety of reasons e.g. she is too afraid, she is embarrassed etc. Her eyes cre-ate an emotional impact on the audi-ence as they show purity and inno-cence and therefore makes it feel as though she is being completely con-trolled by something out of her power (her eating disorder). The connotation of ‘Stories’ on her hands allowed me to make it an affective way in order to cre-

ate a new page. Therefore this image will be featured on the ‘Stories’ page and will be a recognisable way in which the audience can establish what they are looking at. It also represents that the girl is not ready to tell her story yet as her eating disorder still has control of her. The black and white effect again suggests her innocence and allows an emotional impact to take control of the audience in order to make them feel sympathetic towards her.

This image represents the final stages of an eating disorder and the most fatal. It represents how serious the illness can be in a verisimilitude approach through the ideology that the girl has been admitted to hospital due to the band on her arm. The way the hand is positioned represents that

she has lost all of her own control. The shadow positioned across her hand represents her going deeper and deeper into the shadow which can be interpreted as the dark side, death etc. The black and white effect represents a more serious tone for the image and portrays the shadow to be darker and more deadly. It represents lost hope at the girls final stages and therefore perceives how serious the illness can be.

A close-up image of weighing scales simply represent another stereotypical way in which people with eating disorders are perceived to continuously use and there-fore represents them in a different scenario. The black and white effect captures the numbers on the scales and allows them to stand out more clearly and more ef-fective in order to allow the audience to see how much these simple numbers can effect a persons life.