Cassandra Zampini

Liked

The photographic work, Liked, explores the darker side of how women portray themselves on social media.  

Women’s bodies have been objectified for centuries in all forms of media and advertisements, but today social media is the new form of communication consumed at an unprecedented scale and magnitude. To keep up with the billions of “likes” and comments on social media, women arrange themselves in bewildering numbers of carefully posed, curated and heavily edited selfies. The more sexualized the pose, the more likes and comments (and sometimes profits) she receives. The endless cycle refuels her desire for acceptance and plunges her further into the need to achieve cultural standards of beauty, while replaying the tapes for younger generations to aspire. Liked is a composite of hundreds of inverted images and printed on two separate acrylic panels. The first panel is a grid of inverted mirror selfies, where each woman is clearly the author (each holds their phone into the mirror to take the image). However, these images were not pulled from Instagram. Instead, they were culled from websites designed for male audiences where the selfies are reposted and monetized; showing how agency can be stripped away and made into stereotypical categories such as “sexy schoolgirl.” The second panel includes hundreds of inverted “before and after” images from the millions of cosmetic surgery posts on Instagram. Together the two panels are suspended from the wall and when seen from the side they exist independently, but when viewed from the front, the images are blended – one image cannot be seen independently of the other.