Images in Advertising and Society: a Form of Oppression?

Every week, when I travel back and forth from Home to College, I take part in my favorite, sitting in the car, hobby - reading billboards. I have always been fascinated by images and more so by their hidden purpose. The imagination behind such clever production and other forms of art seem to intrigue me. During the ride, I am Almost hypnotized; I absorb the images and their gimmick lines in order to give them the meanings that I prefer. These images indulge me in a world away from the so called general facts of life. They give me new creative ideas on why and how something is the way it is. It may make me sound a bit foolish to confess that I love to spend so much time analyzing pictures. However, I enjoy it. This is why, after always allowing images to create a conversation in my head, it was a great deal of change to read about what others thought of the idea of images themselves. Susan Bordo writes about the influential power of images in her essay "Beauty (Re) discovers the Male Body" Whereas, John Berger writes about how the value of true art is being shuffled, in his Essay "Ways of Seeing." Although, it might seem that both Bordo and Berger are talking about completely different aspects of images, there are areas where both come across each other in thoughts and ideas.