What do leggy women, newspapers, and sexual attraction have in common?
Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's leading trade publication, may need a little sensitivity training these days after people concerned with the objectification of women take a look at their latest promotion.
In an announcement for a photo contest, the organization ran an ad (see above) that can read in several different ways. Signification is the process of making sense of the things we see by interrogating the visual cues and associations represented. What we have here are faceless women, sets of legs, and newspapers without pictures.
The image is accompanied by the headline, "Papers without pictures just aren't very sexy." The associations implied suggest a relationship between newspaper photos, women and sex. We can assume that the people who approved such an advertisement were probably male, although it is hard to say with any assurance.