"Girls on Grass" (Capstone Project)
I work in central marketing for a major public university.
My job entails creating photographic and video assets for admission and recruitment efforts designed to tell a story of the university.
The story we are required to tell is pretty basic, with an emphasis on the pretty.
Messages are designed to say ``look at our beautiful campus made up of beautiful people.’’
At that point, my work had granted me access to classrooms for everything from high-tech science courses to complex branches of engineering, all of which had a healthy population of women doing the work at the same level as men.
One day several years ago, I was meeting with our chief communications officer.
He had just received a test print for a new admissions brochure.
He handed it to me and remarked, ``look more girls on grass. Are we ever going to get away from that?’’
I asked what he meant by the term and he pointed out that in higher-ed materials, women were typically depicted lying in the grass socializing with a book.
I even filmed women working in an instructional model of a nuclear reactor.
Because of this, I knew what my boss was showing me in that brochure was a false narrative.
I knew that it was more likely a constructed moment than a candid one for the two women in the image.
I work in central marketing for a major public university. My job entails creating photographic and video assets for admission and recruitment efforts designed to tell a story of the university. The story we are required to tell is pretty basic, with an emphasis on the pretty. Messages are designed to say ``look at our beautiful campus made up of beautiful people.’’
At that point, my work had granted me access to classrooms for everything from high-tech science courses to complex branches of engineering, all of which had a healthy population of women doing the work at the same level as men.
One day several years ago, I was meeting with our chief communications officer. He had just received a test print for a new admissions brochure. He handed it to me and remarked, ``look more girls on grass. Are we ever going to get away from that?’’ I asked what he meant by the term and he pointed out that in higher-ed materials, women were typically depicted lying in the grass socializing with a book.
I even filmed women working in an instructional model of a nuclear reactor. Because of this, I knew what my boss was showing me in that brochure was a false narrative. I knew that it was more likely a constructed moment than a candid one for the two women in the image.