From Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, 1966–72:
[1]…[?] Untitled (Playboy), c. 1972

Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain
1966–72

Photomontage; originally, collage

This group of thirty-two photomontages extracts depictions of women’s bodies from popular media sources—glossy print ads and men’s magazines—and reassembles them in ways that upend the original messages. As in Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Rosler is largely concerned with the external pressures, expectations, and fantasies projected upon women. In some of the photomontages, Rosler points out the glaring commodification of women’s bodies, drawing attention to the ways that they are posed, segmented, and packaged like products for consumption; in others, she reconceives images of women meant for male consumption as gestures of defiance and expressions of liberation.