Essay Explicate Sturken and Cartwright’s Argument – Report Writing – Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Question 1. 
“Like other practices, looking involves relationships of power. To wilfully look or not is to exercise choice and compliance and to influence whether and how others look. To be made to look, to try to get someone else to look at you or at something you want to be noticed, or to engage in an exchange of looks entails a play of power.” 1 Explicate Sturken and Cartwright’s argument through an analysis of this advertisement.

Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sturken and Cartwright assert that the capacity of images to affect the viewer depends on the cultural meanings they evoke, as well as the social, political and cultural contexts in which they are viewed mainly through the representation of the advertisement. Explicate Sturken and Cartwright’s argues how the BMW advertisement involve relationships of power though the layout of the ad. An advertisement can serve a multitude of purposes, appear in a range of setting and mean different things to different people. 

The BMW advertisement effects the audience viewers in a socially way as it conveys howwomen should look a particular way in order to fit into society, they must have blonde hair, coloured eyes and slim face with blonde features. This is an advertisement used for BMW’s on the left-hand side copy reads ‘you know you’re not the first’. In literal terms this suggests that people in the market for used BMW’s are aware that their cars have had other drivers previous to them. The icon that is represented in the advertisement is the lady with beautiful long blond hair being topless whose face is covering the whole advertisement using sex appeal to grab viewers attention. The media complicated how the public perceives the role of women as this advertisement uses a sexual approach to reach male’s attention. This advertisement was extremely controversial women. Feminists were in outrage over the advertisement. 

Question 2. 
“The language of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted […], it is also the totality of the utterances received: the language must include the ‘surprises’ of meaning”.2 Explain what Barthes means by “the ‘surprises’ of meaning” through an analysis of this photograph.