Digital photography and Body Consciousness

I recently discovered some things about the way programs like Adobe Photoshop can be used to alter the way a person looks, and I think we should consider the implications of these facts in determining our expectations of our own bodies.

Men and women both stare at photos in magazines and lament that they can't have the perfect bodies they see there. What some of them may not realize is the extent to which these photos might be touched up. Heavily. Blemishes can be removed with the touch of a button, inconvenient curves distorted and erased, shadows and highlights reworked to add definition to muscles, perfection to skin. Blurring techniques can clear up complection, and even eyes can be moved about, if need be, to get that perfect look.

In the age of Photoshop, it's worth considering that almost no photography done professionally comes out in a national publication without extensive retouching.

Especially when it comes to being thin. As if the mounds of exercise, skimpy diets or other methods are not enough, those retouching glamour shots often use the tools to smooth away the places where the flesh bunches up where it shouldn't.

In short, we're making our assumptions about what thin looks like based on a digital fiction.

Here's a simple point to be made: the camera always lies. With Photoshop, and other image editing programs, it makes it even better at lying.

So what are we to do, raid the downtown headquarters of the modeling agencies, burn it to the ground? No. We have to change our attitudes about what these images mean. With documentary photography, of course, we should not accept much more than a few technical fixes for clarity. But beyond that, we should keep this one important point in mind: these are forms of communication, not necessarily representations of the truth.

The models in these shots do plenty of work to get their bodies in shape. They probably take up their whole lives in this. Rare ones can get away with doing little exercise and still eat like a normal person, but for the most part, this is a job. Even so, it's revealing that even as they best approximate our ideas of perfection, these people still must be retouched and reshaped in order to meet that ideal.

So let's get clear on this: the people commissioning and taking these shots are not representing reality, they are communicating something to you, something the models, the photographer, the program and the digital artist come together to shape. They are distilling something that in reality would be far more mundane, if it weren't for the labor of all involved.

The inspiration for this post came from working on exercises in Photoshop Restoraton and Retouching, by Katrin Eismann. If you want to know just how much the photos we see are communication, and not reality, this is the book to teach you.