She does this by guilelessly emulating the images around her, as though she fails to perceive their strangeness, as though they were the most natural thing in the world. For years, the Australian comedian and actress Celeste Barber has focused on something different: Rather than show how these lavishly stylized images distort reality, she shows how crazy it is to think they’re depicting any kind of reality, any realm of normal human behavior, at all. But a photo comparison showing how the subject’s waist was artificially cinched still works from the assumption that these images are trying to get away with subtly misrepresenting the real world.

People have spent a very long time attacking these types of glamorous images for being unrealistic - for altering, enhancing and modifying everything down to the models’ physiology. A woman straddles her open hatchback while wrapped in string. A video features a couple of Kardashian-Jenners palpating a wall illuminated by blinking neon tube lights. In another image, a woman in a green bikini and thigh-high patent-leather boots clutches a wall as if suddenly realizing she’s had one too many.

The woman in one video emerges from a Rolls-Royce wearing nothing but underwear and sunglasses, her arm draped across her bare chest.

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