Visual images create desire. As artifacts from contemporary visual culture, visual images inform everyone about society, telling everyone who they are and what they value. They register subliminally within everyone's psyches and alter everyone's perceptions, sometimes without everyone's knowledge. Visual images seem to keep coming and often contain mixed messages that are in direct contrast to their surrounding environments. They form a pastiche of sights and sounds that leave little time for reflection. They are surreal. They are hyper-real. They create the simulacrum that is everyone's postmodern condition. In this article, the author talks about how humans internalize culture using a system of signs, such as language, images, and social cues to self-regulate behavior. She discusses the use of celebrity culture as well as visual culture in the classroom, and addresses the notion of youth culture as a complex cross pollination of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and physical and mental attributes that is mediated through the signs of corporate capitalism. She states that in helping students to understand the technicalities of image creation, teachers can also help them to critically understand the power behind them. Relating photographic images directly to the students' lives can prompt students to attain new levels of understanding. She describes a "Celebrity Photo Assignment" in which students were asked to create a portrait, using classmates as models, that emphasized someone's facial features or aspects of their personality that may or may not be true. This assignment allowed the students to create portraits using body language and apparel that could tranform the model's personality, and thereby convey an image's transformative power.