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Recently, I visited the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, commonly known as the MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona). As I perused the many interesting works of art, I came across a series of photo montages that I found quite intriguing. The above image comes from said series entitled Dvostruki zivot (Double life, 1975), created by the artist Sanja Ivekovic.

Sanja Ivekovic’s Double Life series consists of 62 pairs of photographs where she juxtaposes advertising images and portraits from her own private photo album. The images are paired according to their similarities in physical poses and props. The emphasis on the parallelism between the mass media images and the private photographs obscures the distinction between original and copy. Using this dialogue between images, Ivekovic invites us to consider the nature and origin of the stereotypes of femininity. Does the mass media appropriate expressions, poses, and attitudes from typical female behavior or do women adopt these mannerisms due to the influence of media constructs?

More images from this series: