The Spark That Started a Fire. Annie Leibovitz's Iconic Image of Pregnant Demi Moore and Its Impact Until Today

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), course: Intercultural Competence - Power, Ethics, Ideology: Photography and the Politics of Representation, language: English, abstract: Imagine seeing a naked and very pregnant woman on a cover of a fashion and/or lifestyle magazine while doing your weekly shopping. Coincidentally, the woman pictured is not only pregnant but also good looking at the same time and most likely, she is famous for something. Today, we are no longer surprised or even shocked by that cover, we are simply used to seeing beautiful, famous, naked, and pregnant women on magazine covers as the likes of Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and Claudia Schiffer posed for them as did almost every otherwise famous woman being pregnant. Because somehow it seems to be good form in the world of celebrities to expose the growing belly. Consequently, it appears naturally as if it always had been common practice to put the pregnant body on display naked or scarcely covered, revealing more than concealing leading to 'next-door women' to do just like celebrities do in social media. But this has not always been the case. When Annie Leibovitz shot a series of photographs of Demi Moore in 1991, who at that time was seven months pregnant and had no difficulties in posing naked, covering her breasts only with her hands and even published this photograph on Vanity Fair's August 1991 issue, the world seemed to have stopped for a minute. In this paper I would like to discuss the abovementioned picture and its protagonists, look at the past perception of pregnancy and motherhood and illustrate the changes that evolved after the photograph was published. Thus, by illustrating the changes, the development and processes this 'ground-breaking' picture enabled should become obvious underlining the paper's thesis of the picture as being a step towards a more self-confident, physically attractive self-image of pregnant women but also becoming a trigger of pressure and excessive self-control.