Princess Hijab
I first heard about Princess Hijab in a thread on Flickr. Essentially she covers fashion and beauty ads in public displaying the rote half-naked women with a black hijab shape. The main point of the Flickr discussion was the ethical acceptability of defacing public or private property in the name of anti-consumerism. While I personally wouldn’t practice defacement of private property for political purposes, the more I thought about this issue, the more I became convinced that this goes beyond consumerism or body image issues to the more visuals-pertinent use of public space.
When some argued that she should’ve gone through proper channels and bought public ad space instead of defacing existing ads, it became clear to me that this section of the law is pretty corporation-friendly. One individual (or, to be more general, non-profit/commercial entity) with limited financial funds taking out one or two ads against companies with six or seven figure ad budgets plastering every bus stop, bus, billboard, and sidewalk all across the country? Whether you believe this is fair or not, it’s indisputable that moneyed corporations and their ideas, if they can be called that, dominate our culture visually.
There is no comparable action by individual to counter such a mass of visual input, and I have to say I’ve become sympathetic to her way of working even if I also feel for the owners of the properties that she defaces, who have to clean it up.
Maybe there should be a required balance of ads and PSAs in public, just like how a certain number of radio frequencies or TV stations are reserved for non-commercial stations. Even so, it is rather David vs Goliath. I loved Hulu at the very beginning before the bigger advertisers bought in. The ads were all PSAs for good causes. If our public spaces where filled with a different kind of image, would our society would have different values or priorities?
I’d been sitting on this post for a long time, but recently, in that same Flickr group, we began discussing Anthony Karen’s photoessay (Aryan Outfitters) on the seamstress who produces robes for the Klan, and some people seemed to think that photos like those are implicitly sympathetic to their subjects. In my mind, anyone familliar with any photojournalism would know that this is not true. Yet there are some people who think that it’s bad to depict the perspective of the morally marginal. But I suppose this goes beyond photography – think Humbert Humbert and Nabokov, or, more recently, exhibitions of propaganda art.
To me, these two issues are tightly related. My theory is that our mass overexposure to advertising is training many of us to read all visuals like ads. If it’s shown, it must be promotion, and our intellectual reaction is to judge whether we want to buy (into) it or not. I don’t think this is happening on a conscious level any more.
Lately I’ve been reading books about art and commerce, as well as on luxury branding, so this problem seems huge to me. Is it? Or do we really develop a true immunity to ads with repeated exposure? I guess the more pointed question is whether consumerism is virtually entirely visuals-driven, and if this means anti-consumerist campaigns should be aimed at changing behavior or at combatting the influx of consumer visuals.
