MFA|EDA Amanda Berg (’14) Featured in ‘Slate’

Amanda Berg (2014) was recently featured in Slate
along with images from her project Keg Stand Queens.

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Recently, Slate columnist Emily Yoffe wrote a story advising college women to drink less at social gatherings to lower the risk of sexual assault.* The story pushed a few buttons and ignited a dialogue about drinking culture all over the Internet. For three years, photographer Amanda Berg was steeped in that same dialogue. As a junior at Rochester Institute of Technology, she began photographing her female friends and acquaintances at off-campus house parties to explore the trend of binge drinking for her series “Keg Stand Queens.”

As Yoffe and Berg both point out, undergraduate drinking has increased alongside instances of sexual assault and rape. While Berg, like Yoffe, said she’s concerned about that correlation, she said as a documentarian she’s not interested in pointing fingers or proposing solutions. “I think women are drinking more like men. I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure it’s empowering,” Berg said via email. “Talking about the relationship between alcohol and gender equality today feels controversial, like one has to be careful, and that’s exactly why it is worth confronting—there must be something at stake, something important here to understand.”

Check out the full article here.

 

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