Response to Lecture: Week 3

I feel that the theme of today’s Art Lecture was the way a person is portrayed in the media. The Professor began lecture with demonstration how African American men are portrayed as fighters and criminals in movies. He showed how most of them show up with guns in the poster. I knew I have seen this before but never figured out they were portrayed this way. This brought up questions to my mind. Questions like “ why did African American men show up this way in action movies?” The Professor also talked about an artist named Robert Mapplethorpe who took photographs of men and other people and told us how society viewed his artwork. I thought he was an amazing photographer by how the pictures were taken and I viewed his artwork as clever. The Professor then talked about advertisements and how most of them were confusing. From seeing the ads, I couldn’t figure out what they were selling because the product was too small to see or not even featured in the advertisement. I also saw most ads had models who were in perfect shape and again brought up questions. He ended the lecture by showing a film that featured a man who took photos for one year when he punched in for work. my response to this video was that it was awesome to see how he grew over the period of one year. Overall the lecture opened my eyes to how people are presented in the media. I used to just look at it, but after today I feel like I am going to observe the ads more closely to see what is actually being  presented as the product.