I've been a subscriber to Tennis magazine for several years. Tennis is one of my favorite sports and I'm usually anxious to dive into each issue when it arrives to read about my favorite players and to pick up a few tips for my own game.
With all of that said, I found the October 2007 cover to be a bit comical. It contains a photo of Ana Ivanovic hitting a backhand. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if you look at the cover, which you can do by clicking here, you'll see that her long hair is flowing behind her as she strikes the ball. Every time I've seen Ana play, she's either wearing a visor, like in this photo, or she has her hair up in a pony tail, like in this photo.
Everybody knows that magazine covers are done in such a fashion as to attract the most amount of readers, and generally speaking I don't have any problems with that. But this particular cover seems to be a bit far fetched in my opinion. It isn't overtly sexual, although I can't think of any other reason to have her hair flowing behind her as she strikes a ball, it's just unrealistic.
If you put a beautiful woman on the cover of a magazine, it is going to sell. And of course, there's nothing wrong with beauty. But how far is too far when it comes to using beauty and sexual appeal to sell a product? I'm not being critical of Ana. From what I've seen, she dresses fairly modestly. I'm just raising the question--how far is too far?
2 comments:
I'm thinking that it's a good picture. It's just part of the latest trend in photography... pushing for the simple backgrounds (usually black) but in this case white... also... you can see the photo has been further touched up in terms of smoothing and sharpening and such... almost a Dave Hill style. It's just a trendy style photograph. But certainly... there is always the danger of running into the straight "sex sells" mantra.
Thanks for your comments scw. They make sense. I'm clueless regarding photography techniques, so I'm glad you weighed in.
Post a Comment