Abstract:

As a child, I was drawn to the “magic” of Hollywood. The illusion of effortless beauty and perfect lives began to crack when I noticed how precisely these images were staged. This shift led me to ask: how do media personas construct young women as both spectacle and target, priming them for admiration, scrutiny, and eventual downfall? And how do these narratives continue to circulate so seamlessly that they begin to feel inevitable?

Drawing on John Berger, Laura Mulvey, Simone de Beauvoir, and Susan Sontag, I explore these questions through a comparative visual analysis, building a digital archive that places pop culture media in conversation with historical movements. Organized across four waves of feminism and three media systems—fashion, fiction, and public narrative—the archive traces how recurring representations of femininity circulate over time.

Using Aby Warburg’s concept of Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, I cluster images to reveal a “parallax” of beauty: a shifting but persistent set of visual codes that constructs what feels real. Developed within a social media format, the project operates through the same fast, image-driven language it critiques, encouraging a more active and critical mode of looking.