In John Berger's opinion, we see publicity images every day, whether on television or outside of one's house. Publicity images overpopulate our world to the point that it has become part of people's lives and seems to build up our sense of popular culture. People see these images and accept them as trends that for the most part may live to expectations that are too high to attain realistically. For example, even though a fashion model's job is to maintain a flawlessly beautiful image, and despite physical make-up concealing his or her imperfections, he or she is still digitally manipulated before being printed on an article or magazine.
Most publicity images "live for the moment," as Berger stated. It would only take a single second in time for that moment to change and comprise a list of interpretations that the previous moment may not have pertained to. Regardless, the images are frozen in one, single instant that is never to change, and because of that viewers tend to judge the subject(s) in the image as if they themselves as real people are limited to very few interpretations regarding attitude and personality. A single pose or posture could mean something different depending on the person's hairstyle, facial expression, and the props that surround his or her. Even the smallest things, such as a smile, could change an interpretation entirely and suddenly throw the viewer's sense of context in disarray.
I agree with Berger when he said that publicity images are there even when we don't realize that they're looking at us straight in the eyes. Without us even realizing, these publicity images tell us how to act. Maybe not everybody agrees on the same trends, but we each follow our own preferences of these images, and we combine their ideas together to generate our own original trends and styles. Even though a majority of the public advertisements set standards that nobody could attain without the help of make-up or digital manipulations, I believe that it's these kinds of things that help us think outside the box in terms of choreography and special effects in movies, video games, and other forms of realistically fictional forms of entertainment. On the other hand, in terms of topics such as glamor, people need to start accepting themselves without having to manipulate their features to the point that it describes them in a way that is not true. Doing so, will just make us even more shallow than we already are and trick ourselves into thinking that we could become like those fantasies in that these public images depict.
