Blog Post 1by Brittany Cabanas (Nikki S. Lee, The Yuppie Project)

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Nikki S. Lee’s photo (shown above) is part of a series of projects where she immerses herself into different cultures and actually portrays herself as a person from that culture. Here she is portraying a yuppie, which is a slang term for a young middle-class professional (usually white) who works in the city and has a luxurious lifestyle. From her pearl necklace and long dress, you can see that she is portraying a person with some wealth. At first the photo reminded me of my house. From the white walls to the family photographs, it looked like an older middle-class family would live there. It isn’t a modern apartment in the middle of Manhattan, but it seems like a middle-class home. It didn’t really jumped out to me as luxurious or very wealthy, but it could be a young middle-class person just stating out at some professional job. What immediately jumped out to Adam and I as the punctum was the date stamp on the side of the photo. Looking back at all my home videos and photos from when I was a kid those date stamps were always on the side. Nikki Lee is perfectly showing the average middle-class white home here. It interested me so much because of how well she depicted white middle-class Americans. It was as if I was looking at my own living room. Something else I found interesting as I looked at her other photos was that when she was portraying an American American or Latino group, she changed her skin color and really tried to disguise the fact that she was Asian. In this photo, she is blatantly showing that she is asian and not trying to totally disguise herself as a young white professional. Nikki Lee tried really hard to blend into the minority and “non-mainstream” groups, but didn’t really do the same in The Yuppie Project. The only question I have from looking at this photo is why does she try to blend into minority groups and not into the white majority?

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