Ten decades twenty photos

Photographer Anna Lisa has explored the themes of society and culture in these 10 sets of photographs. In each pair, she recreates both the culture and counter culture of the past ten decades. A very innovative and enjoyable concept, she has not only replicated the style and clothes of the decade but also the development of photography and the general feel of the era.

The truth about beauty ads

Anna Hill, 24, is an art student studying at East Carolina University. For a project she undertook in class, Anna investigated how women are being fooled by advertising corporations into buying their products by stimulating desire for what we haven't got (and what is impossible to obtain), and simultaneously creating anxieties about the features we were born with and we live with. 

Using photoshop, Anna has created a selection of 'mockvertisements' - that is, a bunch of adverts created as a parody to the ones we see everyday in so called 'glossies', a term coined by feminist theorist Imelda Whelehan to describe magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour that promise an attractive and shiny lifestyle within their pages. Anna picks up on the fact that advertisers use Photoshop way too much and the women displayed to promote the products are not real and buying the product will not make you look like that. 

Anna describes her unexpected reaction to the images:

"One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited [image], it looked so wrong and kinda gross," Hill said. "It made me extra aware of how skewed my perception was after looking at the edited ones for a while."

So there we go, despite Anna knowing that the images she created were completely fake, she still felt increased anxieties after looking back to the natural shots, replicating what women all over the modern world feel at looking at what is advertised as the desirable woman, when really she doesn't exist at all.

Read more on the Huffington Post

Alana Dee Haynes

Alana - who calls herself Dee - combines photography with drawing, creating beautiful images. The majority of Dee's work concentrates on human flesh, and she adds her personal touches through drawing, almost like tattoos, to the print. The effect is really quite impressive.

Check out more of Dee's artwork

Light and faces

Being an art student, whenever I watch something on screen and there's good light on a person's face, I immediately think about how I would paint them. An artist has studied how light affects the perception of a face, it really is interesting how different this girl looks when the light is altered.

ITSAJACKAL: life drawings

'take pictures,  draw pictures (use a mechanical pencil .3mm) scan drawing. then darken and shadow in photoshop.' - itsajackal (tumblr)

A modern take on Vermeer

The original

Unfortunately, I'm not sure who has done this, but it is a comical take on Vermeer's classic, 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this painting, and many of you are probably also familiar with the myspace camera shot. The artist here has combined the two, and the result is quite humorous. 

Jenn Violetta

Jenn's Flickr