Docu-Glam—Part I: Fact vs. Make-Believe in the Age of Photoshop

For all the commotion about how digital photo retouching (“photoshopping”) deceives the eye and causes low self-esteem among women and teen girls, in fact it is only the last of countless “retouches” Western women apply to themselves. Daily, monthly, or permanent alterations to a woman’s face and body shape are tolerated and even encouraged in our society. For example, how many graying women under 65 DON’T color their hair? Even boob jobs and face lifts are socially acceptable, provided they are not blatant or (God forbid!) lopsided! Yet we feel betrayed the minute a photo is manipulated, as though we must draw a moral line somewhere. The message is: retouch your body all you like, but photos should remain an inviolable documentation of reality. What’s behind such a paradox?

Our desire to look good makes us responsible, collectively, for the super-perfect images in our media.

Deep down, we all want to look good to others. This goal shapes our visual world, determines our purchases and, ultimately, dictates the routines we apply to our own appearance. Our cultural standard is perfection, from the foods we eat…to the sparkling shine of floors…to manicured suburban lawns…to the appearance of our own bodies. Social media like FaceBook and YouTube just increase our need to look good so we can attract “friends” and get our share of “views.”

We put tremendous pressure on science and technology to serve up an ideal world, free of pain, disease, disfigurement, and defiant of death. Yet reality is more likely to be blotchy, crooked, or a downright calamitous mess. The computer-manipulated photo becomes a way to conceal the truth, to rehabilitate our dashed ideals and reassure us that we live in the best time in history and the greatest empire in the world. In this context, it’s preposterous to expect that imaging technology — along with moral outrage — would stay frozen in the last century, and that we should only see raw, documentary-style photos in our fashion magazines, packaging, or ads. We NEED these perfect, idealized photos to counterbalance pictures of the dreadful truth of what we have done to our planet through carelessness, greed, and ignorance.

I would go so far as to argue that a Western woman’s freedom to manipulate her appearance is a political statement. While our sisters in the Muslim world must suppress their looks under a burqa, our obsession with appearances becomes all the more exaggerated, liberating, and futuristic. Ads for personal care products emphasize their use of the latest technologies to enhance appearance. Smiling prettily, being photographed at our best, or striking an alluring pose for the camera is both our right and our reward for the efforts we make toward improving our image.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in celebrity images. To support our populist form of royalty, we expect them to be perfect and super-human, the likenesses of goddesses. With today’s instant reproductions, media marketing blitzes, and digital chit-chat, they appear everywhere. Certain of these pictures are destined to achieve immortal status. Littered across the web, they are copied and parodied alongside famous historical artworks like the Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Venus, or The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Our job as photo retouchers is to create the most fantastic, powerful, and memorable images of women (and men) the world has ever seen — or at least to conjure up the ILLUSION that these ideals exist!

It’s important to remember that retouching comes after countless contrivances of body, face, and hair styling, to say nothing of lights, filters, and other photographic tricks and tools. To put photoshopping in context, let’s consider what happens long before the camera’s click. The chart below shows various tools and technologies with which most women (and men) improve, change, or manipulate their physical appearance, from rudimentary grooming such as hair cuts and shaving, to fleeting enhancements like make-up, to radical procedures like lifts and tucks, implants, and laser treatments. While basic grooming is just downright practical, very few people — except the homeless, rebel-hippie-artist-types, and members of certain religious sects — do NOTHING whatsoever to touch up their looks. Most of us make some changes to our appearance, and take for granted that others do too. Where we draw the line can differ greatly from one person to another. Yet the popular consensus is that photoshopping is going too far.

When photos are obviously doctored and can no longer be relied upon as truthful, people get upset. On the other hand, truthful photos — particularly those that document the harsh, ugly realities of life — tend to be disturbing. We find them shocking and hard to look at, much less stomach. Such photos can even border on the obscene, and only sick or morbid people would take pleasure in looking at them. Yet there they are in the daily news, popping up in searches unless we set up content filters.

We all know the cruelties of Nature and the consequences of our tampering with it, whether we see the pictures or not. This knowledge creates our unconscious yearning for that which is pure, perfect, and beautiful. The result is that we have collectively created the iconic, retouched images of our super stars. Each one of us inadvertently pressures image makers to fix whatever is ugly, ordinary, or merely aging. Let me demonstrate how this phenomenon works.

Look at Madonna, the 80’s version — saucy, sexy, iconoclastic — the way we remember, and more important, imagine her to be. Here, imagination trumps remembering since we never knew Madonna personally. We likely saw so many images and video of her, or memorized so many of her songs, that we feel as if we knew her. In fact, most of us never saw her face to face, except perhaps as a distant figure in a live concert. The imagined Madonna is the one who lives forever in our minds: larger than life, the Goddess of Post-Modernism. We forget that our “relationship” with such a celebrity is mediated through the media, and we know of her only through the media. Meanwhile, the archetypal Madonna has already outlived the real, human Madonna. This true and real Madonna has become someone we can no longer actually “see.”

When I first saw the image at left, I felt a shock similar to the time I discovered my childhood home had been demolished and replaced by an imposter. It was like a bad dream with the front door missing, my bedroom on a different floor, and nothing as I remembered it! Similarly, when I saw this factual Madonna, I felt oddly affronted. My mind automatically compared each detail of her face with my imagined Madonna, and the former came up wrong: the sagging chin, the wrinkles, the puffiness just didn’t fit the internalized image.

 

Yet there is nothing at all wrong about the real Madonna of today! In fact, if I had never seen the iconic 80’s Madonna, and only today saw this photo of an unknown woman in her early fifties, I would think, “What a striking woman! Her eyes are powerful, mesmerizing. Who IS she?” Of course, I could only think such thoughts after consciously putting out of my mind all preconceptions of beauty, feminine power, and most especially, my internalized ideal Madonna. Try it yourself. It’s amazing to discover how blind we have become and how insistent we are on our ideas of the way people should look.

Our culture does not want realistic-looking female celebrities. They should be young and smooth, without a hair out of place. If a model has cellulite and blotchy skin, no one wants to see it, except the gossips. We want to buy the illusion that she is the apex of her kind of woman: perfect, immortal, ideal. Similarly, when a celebrity dies, the media don’t publish a photo of the person old or dead, but the younger, iconic one we adore. Consciously or unconsciously, we want to fantasize a life of incomparable beauty, fame, and adoration, and we collectively create, desire, and use idealized images as a starting point.

It’s not just in images, though, that we won’t tolerate imperfection. In the supermarket no one buys the bruised apple, the sprouted potato, the wrinkled onion, or the pale strawberries. Bruises and blemishes, discoloration and misshapen forms are unacceptable all around. Our cultural norm is the shrink-wrapped pristine package as equally as it is the image of a model who hasn’t passed her Best-Before date.

We all know no one REALLY looks like the magazine pictures. The mistake we make is to think we are looking at the person and not the image. Interestingly, even when we look directly at the person, who besides a professional can be certain whose hair is dyed, which teeth have been orthodontically straightened and whitened, which breasts are artificially enlarged, or whose face has been lifted?

Returning to Photoshop land, only a professional can tell for sure in which ways each photo has been altered. When a client wants porcelain skin, impossible muscles, or pregnant breasts atop a wasp-sized waist, the photo retoucher performs cosmetic surgery with a relatively minor cost and no physical consequences to the person involved. Most of us reveal the Before and After of our work, in order to show our skills and talents as the ultimate illusion-makers.

I suspect most photo retouchers got into the business through highly realistic drawing and painting skills, combined with a passion for appearances. I know I did. Photorealism is an unforgiving standard to attain in traditional media and handwork. In photo retouching, or “Photoshopping,” our work must be credible, meaning that an average viewer should believe the final result is a real, true photograph of a person. Our goal is to make our work invisible, which means rather ironically that we have achieved THE ILLUSION OF FACT!

I have emphasized photoshopped images of women in this article, not for the obvious reason that they are the chief consumers of beauty products and cosmetic surgery, but because the young, fertile woman holds the promise of new life. Her children will create the future, and the more perfect and beautiful she looks, the more we can fantasize that a new race of super humans will come along to clean up the wreckage we have created in the world. This is why we cannot stand to see our stars age: without them, there will be no future. The world will be hopelessly doomed.

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person.

They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

     – Marilyn Monroe

To summarize, people go to great lengths to look their best, even in snapshots. In the fashion and entertainment worlds, we can expect contrived and perfect-looking images because we secretly desire them. These pictures serve our need for fantasy and can therefore be separated from blotchy, lumpy, asymmetrical reality. By discerning the image from the real person, we can restore our self-esteem, confident in the knowledge that everyone has flaws and anyone with a computer, some software, and a little skill can retouch them.

Finally, I believe we should be grateful to professional photo retouchers whose convention is to reveal the “before” and “after” images. Photo retouchers are not wicked deceivers; rather, they are gifted artists who fill a much needed function in our world by furnishing the portals to our hopes and dreams.

I humbly invite you to my photo retouching page. Also check out the sites of photo retouchers I respect, including Terry Sanders, Daniel Meadows, Joan Wood, and Stephan Sagmiller.

I welcome your comments and links below.

Please stay tuned for Docu-glam Part II: Peek Performance

Sonya Shannon
Lafayette, Colorado