Enough With The Photoshop Hysteria
Amanda Fortini talks sense on retouching in New York Mag.
Is anyone else weary of the media's hunt for retouched images to ridicule? A little more than a week ago, blogs were abuzz over unretouched photos of Jennifer Aniston, outtakes from a 2006 cover shoot for British Harper's Bazaar, in which the ever-tan actress looked less sun-kissed than sun-abused, a mere human not yet buffed to a celebrity gloss. Two weeks earlier, the pressing issue was whether Jessica Simpson -- whose career has lately consisted of public proclamations of her newfound détente with her zaftig figure -- was airbrushed to slimness on the September cover of Lucky....The issue, many critics of Photoshopping claim, is one of social ethics and emotional sensitivity. Retouched photos set an unrealistic bar for suggestible young girls, and therefore cry out to be exposed.
...But how many adult women actually take the images in fashion magazines -- artificial as they are, feats of makeup and lighting and camera angles, even without retouching -- at face value? "Our readers are not idiots," Christine Leiritz, editor of French Marie Claire, told the New York Times last year, "especially when they see those celebrities who are 50 and look 23." Most of us who read fashion magazines don't feel we're confronting reality when we see a photograph of a grown woman with preteen thighs. (We certainly see enough countervailing tabloid shots to know exactly what celebrity thighs look like.) If such photos enrage us, and often they do, it's not because they damage our self-esteem, nor -- let's be honest -- because we're constantly fretting, like some earnest psychologist or crusading politician, about the emotional repercussions for adolescent girls. Our interest in altered images is not purely moral; it's also aesthetic. We believe that a picture should convey, "objectively," without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured. But these days, come to a fashion, consumer, or celebrity magazine with this quaint puritanical notion in mind, and you're bound to be disappointed: Many contemporary images are illustrations masquerading as photographs, cartoons composed with a computer rather than a pen.
...The age-old game of glamour creation, from Renaissance portraiture to Playboy centerfolds, has always been one of frank enhancement. Retouched pictures simply claim the traditional prerogatives of illustrations: to exaggerate, accentuate, and improve upon their subjects -- basically, to lie. For much of the last century, models and movie stars in fashion magazines and advertisements were often rendered as drawings or paintings. In The Girl on the Magazine Cover, journalism professor Carolyn Kitch explains that magazines were "dealing in ideals rather than reality," and the vaguer contours of an illustration "could represent both a specific type of female beauty," as well as more general "model attributes," like "youth, innocence, sophistication, modernity, upward mobility," etc. Of course, illustrations also appealed to their vain subjects, who were usually portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. In the ads of illustrator Gil Elvgren, for example, the women are libidinous fantasies -- a busty girl-next-door seductively rides a carousel to sell Coca-Cola; another, for whom busty is an understatement, shills for a Certa mattress. His pinups were even more outlandish in their homogenized well-endowedness. Not surprisingly, Hollywood starlets were eager for Elvgren to elevate them with his magic paintbrush. Similarly, Alberto Vargas, the famous creator of Esquire's Vargas girl and numerous Playboy illustrations, was favored by many Golden Age movie stars (Betty Grable Jane Russell, Ava Gardner) of his day. The melon-breasted, small-waisted sameness of his images invented something of a new pulp genre: physiological science fiction.
Comments
When I get a little time I can go looking for the article, but the upshot is that those fragile and naive adolescent girls know Photoshop when they see it. Something like 80% of girls know that magazine pictures are photoshopped to unrealistic proportions and say they don't strive to imitate those images.
Posted by: Elle at August 31, 2010 6:17 AM
My objection to Photoshopping pics isn't about people not understanding that it happens. It's about a commitment to presenting reality as it is. I took to heart the lessons learned from a newspaper editor I worked with, who would get angry if we so much as reversed the pictures to create a more fluid design.
Yes, I know Cosmo isn't journalism.
I would like to see magazines have the nerve to present people who are naturally beautiful, even with their flaws. It won't happen, since people buying the magazines prefer the fantasy. But I can dream.
Posted by: MonicaP at August 31, 2010 6:37 AM
They sometimes post models without makeup for a feature on models without makeup. Me? If I want to see real people, I walk outside.
Posted by: Amy Alkon 
at August 31, 2010 6:41 AM
a busty girl-next-door seductively rides a carousel to sell Coca-Cola
And all I'm gonna remember are hawt chick with boobies!, not that she's hawking Coca-Cola. You silly marketers...
Posted by: I R A Darth Aggie at August 31, 2010 6:49 AM
Never mind the girls and women, what about us poor guys we are being fed false images of women that we can never get.
Posted by: John Paulson at August 31, 2010 7:19 AM
Hey, I just discovered what's good for the goose is also good for the gander:
http://housemd.iimmgg.com/image/546ec35d1b8c7ca0fe6a91ea7a82db48
It literally took me half an hour to figure out that was Photoshopped - I knew it looked wrong, but I generally don't suspect them of Photoshopping guys, for some reason.
Posted by: Ann at August 31, 2010 8:18 AM
Organically grown stuff just doesn't look as good as the enhanced versions!
As a selling point, so many products are advertised as having no artificial preservatives, additives, flavors or colors.
And yet your basic human is all about: Preservatives (vitamins, wrinkle cream, etc.)
Additives (all plastic surgery, fake butts, fake boobs, girdles)
Artificial Flavors (mouthwash, tooth paste, etc.)
Artificial Colors (make-up, hair coloring, etc.)
And then after all that, photoshopping still makes us look bad. No wonder people get pissed about it.
Posted by: Pricklypear at August 31, 2010 9:31 AM
I also don't believe the magazines when they say ... great buy, a steal at ... $3000 for lip gloss
>>> We believe that a picture should convey, "objectively," without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured.
In vacation photos, Yes. In magazines, where it's Art, No. I usually only buy September magazines, because it's the month of Big issues. 90% of the magazine is crazy, stylish ads.
Posted by: MeganNJ at August 31, 2010 9:32 AM
When I was 17, I didn't know images were so dramatically altered, and now I just don't understand the point of Photoshop - why do it? If these magazines aren't actually encouraging women to aspire to unnatural standards of beauty and men to expect unnatural standards of beauty (ie, they assume all readers KNOW the model has been altered completely) why use Photoshop at all? If it's for artistic reasons why don't they just scrap the models altogether and create their own images? Hillary Johnson once posted something on her beauty blog, I can't find it now, but it was something like - why stop at removing wrinkles and a couple inches of waistline? Why not make your models leopard-printed? (I don't think she was up in arms about Photoshop but I thought it was an interesting point.)
The website Jezebel.com writes about this also, from a different perspective. They linked to a London Fog ad campaign where Christina Hendricks was featured as the model, and the final ad had trimmed probably 5 inches off her waist, entirely transforming her figure. That's baffling to me, Hendricks is famous for her curves - why did they even choose her if they were going to distort her so much?
Posted by: Sam at August 31, 2010 11:49 AM
Who is buying these magazines? I thought men were the reason that women have unrealistic expectations of their own bodies? I have not seen too many guys going out to buy cosmo or Marie Claire.
Take accountability for your own actions. If you are affected by seeing air-brushed pictures of perfect women--don'y buy the magazine.
Posted by: mike at August 31, 2010 2:13 PM
I'm pretty sure Maxim, Playboy, and GQ all use photoshop too. It seems to me, at least amongst the guys I know, that men don't realize celebrities don't actually look like their magazine photos. They are floored when they see the unretouched images.
Posted by: LL at August 31, 2010 4:21 PM
Every publication uses Photoshop. Regardless of what gender they're catering to. And you see images without purchasing the publication, if you buy groceries or frequent most stores.
Posted by: Sam at August 31, 2010 4:42 PM
I had an acquaintance in college who informed me that the first time he was a woman naked in person he was shocked - and it was a person I knew, a 19 year old woman with a very nice figure, athletic, prime shape. The friend of mine was seriously shocked that her skin had imperfections and that when she rolled over in bed - twisted - that the skin on her side folded slightly.
I know he was an extreme example - he was extremely, um, sheltered, never seeing his parents or siblings naked, apparently, and I guess no actual porn videos. But he's a prime example of some of the negative effects of altered images.
But yes, I also think he's a moron.
Posted by: Jessica F. at September 1, 2010 1:58 PM
The only difference between now, and 50 years ago, is that back then all the retouching was done by an actual person (the Retoucher), whose job it was. And that person used things like ink and pencil crayon, and spray lacquer, to retouch each individual photograph in most cases (as negative retouching is incredibly hard, and still leaves a mark on the print to 'finish up'.
This practice is not only not new, but only remarkable in the ease and speed with which one can accomplish what it once took a dedicated position literally days to do.
Posted by: Factory at September 4, 2010 1:41 PM
