Revised Blog Post #20

Greenfield's Rhetorical Implications: Cleaned Up & Revealed

The following paragraph is a revision to my previous blog post. It is intended to reflect Brumberg's essay more closely, and embody a stronger rhetorical analysis that fully indicates Greenfield's style and purpose within her project. I hope these changes made for a smoother read! 

       

This photo reflects the pressure women feel to be thin in modern America. https://appsychtextbk.wikispaces.com/Anorexia+Nervosa

Greenfield's gallery of photographic images subtly illuminate a transition from traditionally self accepting women to a modern trend of adolescent girls assuming negative body images, as well as inner dissatisfactions and anxieties in order to empower her audience to combat mental degradation. The spontaneous, in-the-moment photos depict normal, daily events of all women, ranging from celebrities to teenage girls, but serve to illuminate the sentience of all females into one underlying wishful attitude that encapsulates the individual desire to fit an expected thin, "barbie like" American ideal; thus, providing reason to the lack of confidence and growing health concerns of modern American women.  The mixture of women in these photos all appear photogenic and normal at first glance, but possess implications of self-hate or stereotypical aesthetic American expectations. Analyzing different ethnic groups by utilizing perceptive imagery and societal norms, Greenfield harnesses the ability to vision the "thin ideal" of women in numerous communities, ultimately shedding light to individual mindsets regarding body image, and cultural coneptions of "perfection." Greenfield's photography continues to draw negative correlations between the mental struggle modern women are facing today with the societal pressures present in modern America. Greenfield's imagery is powerful and raw, and follows a journey of womanhood and acceptance with every age.



By recreating Brumberg's essay, I learned that every sentence in a rhetorical sentence should include the implications of the assertion being made. For example, I could say Greenfield's gallery intends to display the trend towards negative body images in American women today. However, in order to rhetorically justify this statement, I would need to add an explanation of the detrimental social effects on American women overall. So, my sentence would read something like this: The spontaneous, in-the-moment photos depict normal, daily events of all women, ranging from celebrities to teenage girls, but serve to illuminate the sentience of all females into one underlying wishful attitude that encapsulates the individual desire to fit an expected thin, "barbie like" American ideal; thus, providing reason to the lack of confidence and growing health concerns of modern American women. In my previous paragraph, I lacked a lot of the deeper meanings exemplified in Greenfield's gallery. Basically, I gave a surface analysis. This type of analysis reminds me of a visual analysis- mostly helpful in understanding the fundamental ideals of a topic. However, once I compared my paragraph to Brumberg's, I realized I needed to include more about Greenfield's craft and underlying purposes. With this in mind, I altered some of my words and added to my sentences in order to depict Greenfield in a stronger light, and assert my approval to her campaign in women's empowerment.




Original Paragraph: Lauren Greenfield’s arresting collection of photographic images brings new energy and insight to the larger societal discussion of what has happened to American girls. Her savvy, on-the-spot camera is a function of her work as a photojournalist recording the world of American popular culture, but her work ranges here beyond celebrity icons such as Jennifer Lopez and Venus Williams to reveal both the inner and exterior lives of anonymous American girls. In combining the voices of girls with their portraits, Greenfield acts as reporter and cultural anthropologist as well as art photographer. She used such a mixed-media strategy before, in the award-winning Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, but this journey takes her nationwide into different regional and ethnic communities. With an eye for both the ordinary and the idiosyncratic, she provides an animated, colorful canvas that visually narrates the ways in which girls, their bodies, and their psyches entwine with American popular culture. Be forewarned: There are no Girl Scouts here. Greenfield’s camera probes the process of becoming a woman in a decidedly less institutional way, visiting bedrooms, bathrooms, and waiting rooms, seeking out little girls, teenagers, and adult women in telling public and private moments.