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Okay, in spite of being an admitted photoshop junkie, some of the wailing that happens when magazines, advertisers, etc. are "caught" editing their photos makes me roll my eyes and say "Oh, please."
As does the proposal of France passing a law that says images that have been edited need to carry a warning statement to alert their audiences to that fact, like a pack of cigarettes with a cancer warning.
A while back a YouTube video was being posted around wherein people were decrying the use of photo editing software, saying "But we didn't know we weren't looking at actual photos! We didn't know!" (I can't find the one that first got me going, now, because YouTube is so full of videos just like it. Watch a few, if you're so inclined...they're fascinating.)
Well, you are looking at actual photos, I'd say, the thing you didn't know (or try to deny) is that photos are not "real life", photos are art. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, and all that jazz.
And wearing my "art historian" hat, I always have to wonder, whenever I hear this statement, when did people stop knowing?
I look through the history of fashion magazines and advertising, in particular.
The American fashion consumer in 1933, for example, knew that the fashionable images on the covers of their magazines were artistic illustrations of feminine beauty, produced by the hand of an artist. The images may have been based on actual women, but they were largely a creation from the artist's mind, skillfully rendered in a way that would appeal to women who might buy the magazine (or the perfume, fashion, hosiery, and lipstick sold inside it).
About the French legislation, Valerie Boyer, of President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party, is quoted as saying "These photos can lead people to believe in a reality that does not actually exist, and have a detrimental effect on adolescents. "Many young people, particularly girls, do not know the difference between the virtual and reality, and can develop complexes from a very young age." (Emphasis mine.)
So I ask, did young French girls know, in the era before photography?
Did they, like Americans, know in 1958?
That wasn't so long ago...how did we "forget" or simply become ignorant between 1958 and, say, the 1990's?
Sure, the advent and use of photography made things trickier, for sure--but photography (particularly in fashion and advertising) was always edited. I always like this "before and after" of Joan Crawford as a demonstration of that...long before Photoshop, guys. Before computers, even. Anyone who ever took a darkroom class back in the old days knows that "burning" and "dodging" were essential steps of printing a good (artistic) photograph.
In fashion and advertising, photography was, in fact, from the beginning, blatantly merged right along with illustration to create "composite" visions of women, both photographic and sketched, carefully smoothed to blend the two into one harmonious image (and sell a product at the same time):
(a larger version of this is here: http://pics.livejournal.com/daphnep/pic/0023y5ey)
I say it's not the editing that's the problem, it is, like Valerie Boyer and most of the people complaining say outright, the not knowing. But I point fingers for that ignorance in a different direction, since we did, obviously, "know" what art was for a very, very long time. And it's not the job of every illustrator, artist, and graphic designer to label their art "warning, the model who posed for this photo wouldn't actually look like this if you met her for brunch" any more than the photo-illustration hybrid women, above, should have worn warnings along their compression undergarments, or any more than Jean-Dominique Ingres (a Frenchman known for his draftsmanship) should have been forced to write that on every drawing and painting that he completed.
Now you know. Fashion photography is art. Advertising is art. The lines are blurred all the time, regardless of era, regardless of artistic medium. Photoshop makes it easier but photoshop does not make it new. We do "know the difference between the virtual and reality". We have no excuses, in this day and age, to not be visually literate consumers.
In fact, even one of the "pro-banning" "Photoshop is bad for our self-esteems" videos on YouTube (called "Photoshop Effects" Parts 1 and 2, from Diet.com), states the solution straight out, before skipping on to a different position entirely: According to The Body Project, the ability of girls to distinguish an airbrushed image diminished her likelihood to develop a disordered perception of perfection, and as a result also lowered her odds of developing an eating disorder.
It's "the ability to distinguish an image" that makes the difference: the ability to "read" and decipher what we're looking at. Which is exactly why I think everyone should know some basic "how-tos" on Photoshop. If you can read an image and understand it for what it is, you will have a more healthy, reasonable reaction to it. Literacy can be taught.
This is particularly important right now because technology continues to move forward even as our literacy (and what the average consumer will fess up to "knowing") moves backwards.
So to prepare yourself for the next advancement, you should know about "Photosketch/Sketch2Photo" as well as Photoshop: http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/home.htm
The world moves ahead in leaps and bounds. Ignorance is no excuse.
As does the proposal of France passing a law that says images that have been edited need to carry a warning statement to alert their audiences to that fact, like a pack of cigarettes with a cancer warning.
A while back a YouTube video was being posted around wherein people were decrying the use of photo editing software, saying "But we didn't know we weren't looking at actual photos! We didn't know!" (I can't find the one that first got me going, now, because YouTube is so full of videos just like it. Watch a few, if you're so inclined...they're fascinating.)
Well, you are looking at actual photos, I'd say, the thing you didn't know (or try to deny) is that photos are not "real life", photos are art. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, and all that jazz.
And wearing my "art historian" hat, I always have to wonder, whenever I hear this statement, when did people stop knowing?
I look through the history of fashion magazines and advertising, in particular.
The American fashion consumer in 1933, for example, knew that the fashionable images on the covers of their magazines were artistic illustrations of feminine beauty, produced by the hand of an artist. The images may have been based on actual women, but they were largely a creation from the artist's mind, skillfully rendered in a way that would appeal to women who might buy the magazine (or the perfume, fashion, hosiery, and lipstick sold inside it).
About the French legislation, Valerie Boyer, of President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party, is quoted as saying "These photos can lead people to believe in a reality that does not actually exist, and have a detrimental effect on adolescents. "Many young people, particularly girls, do not know the difference between the virtual and reality, and can develop complexes from a very young age." (Emphasis mine.)
So I ask, did young French girls know, in the era before photography?
Did they, like Americans, know in 1958?
That wasn't so long ago...how did we "forget" or simply become ignorant between 1958 and, say, the 1990's?
Sure, the advent and use of photography made things trickier, for sure--but photography (particularly in fashion and advertising) was always edited. I always like this "before and after" of Joan Crawford as a demonstration of that...long before Photoshop, guys. Before computers, even. Anyone who ever took a darkroom class back in the old days knows that "burning" and "dodging" were essential steps of printing a good (artistic) photograph.
In fashion and advertising, photography was, in fact, from the beginning, blatantly merged right along with illustration to create "composite" visions of women, both photographic and sketched, carefully smoothed to blend the two into one harmonious image (and sell a product at the same time):
(a larger version of this is here: http://pics.livejournal.com/daphnep/pic/0023y5ey)
I say it's not the editing that's the problem, it is, like Valerie Boyer and most of the people complaining say outright, the not knowing. But I point fingers for that ignorance in a different direction, since we did, obviously, "know" what art was for a very, very long time. And it's not the job of every illustrator, artist, and graphic designer to label their art "warning, the model who posed for this photo wouldn't actually look like this if you met her for brunch" any more than the photo-illustration hybrid women, above, should have worn warnings along their compression undergarments, or any more than Jean-Dominique Ingres (a Frenchman known for his draftsmanship) should have been forced to write that on every drawing and painting that he completed.
Now you know. Fashion photography is art. Advertising is art. The lines are blurred all the time, regardless of era, regardless of artistic medium. Photoshop makes it easier but photoshop does not make it new. We do "know the difference between the virtual and reality". We have no excuses, in this day and age, to not be visually literate consumers.
In fact, even one of the "pro-banning" "Photoshop is bad for our self-esteems" videos on YouTube (called "Photoshop Effects" Parts 1 and 2, from Diet.com), states the solution straight out, before skipping on to a different position entirely: According to The Body Project, the ability of girls to distinguish an airbrushed image diminished her likelihood to develop a disordered perception of perfection, and as a result also lowered her odds of developing an eating disorder.
It's "the ability to distinguish an image" that makes the difference: the ability to "read" and decipher what we're looking at. Which is exactly why I think everyone should know some basic "how-tos" on Photoshop. If you can read an image and understand it for what it is, you will have a more healthy, reasonable reaction to it. Literacy can be taught.
This is particularly important right now because technology continues to move forward even as our literacy (and what the average consumer will fess up to "knowing") moves backwards.
So to prepare yourself for the next advancement, you should know about "Photosketch/Sketch2Photo" as well as Photoshop: http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/home.htm
The world moves ahead in leaps and bounds. Ignorance is no excuse.
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Reminds me of the movie "Idiocracy". It's funny, but scary,....
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Hmm... that sentence struck me too, but I had a very different reaction. I wouldn't have put it that way. I would say that knowledge and skill sets are more and more specialized the more complex our society gets, and we have less reason to learn complicated skills that don't apply to our jobs.
I haven't seen "Idiocracy," but if it argues that the increasing specialization of skills in our society is making us all stupid, I'd be kind of interested in seeing how it makes that point and what alternatives it proposes. It's definitely true that the focus on special skills that we need to be competitive is probably keeping us from learning some basic skills we'd need if everything went to hell... but I wouldn't consider photoshop one of those "basic skills." :)
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It's not just photoshop, either--it's all thing technological. I mean, we used to be able to laugh about people who didn't know how to program their VCRs--it was okay, even humorous, to be technologically unskilled. But the day-to-day demands of technology are spreading for even those of us who aren't programmers and working specifically in tech fields. Even in my arty job I have to be able to know how to put together a PowerPoint presentation, and how to use an internet browser to join in on a "Go-to" virtual meeting between professionals working at a long distance from each other. I have to create and send PDFs, spreadsheets, databases, and trouble-shoot a variety of equipment that didn't even exist when I was in school...I could go on and on. I mean, sure, we can leave a lot of that to someone else, but it's a severe handicap to risk it.
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(I'm sure men are the same, I just don't often flip through fashion magazines with men.) :D
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http://community.livejournal.com/illustrators/
It's most excellent!
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I wonder...
What I wonder now is, is there any way to make sure young girls know what we know/have learned? Is there any way to help them see these covers for what they are and help them to not feel harmed by it all? How do we help them understand?
You and I have art and photography backgrounds, however amateur (well, my experience is amateur anyway!). I think it might be easier for us to see it as art and not as deception, which it seems many women/girls think it is. (I still see a fair bit of anger when photoshopping is discussed, for example.)
And, in all of this, what do men truly think? Do they know? Does it matter?
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Re: I wonder...
Letting them play around with "paint" programs on the computer themselves. Sure, art classes should also have a digital medium, too--we're living in a digital era. The movies we watch are half digital effects, too--just like kids graduate from cartoons to live-action films, but learn that people getting shot aren't really dying. We can help them learn to "read" images the same way, starting with drawings in kids book to "live action" photos which are still just as artificial as the movies.
And I also adamantly think it does matter that boys/men know, too. They're being "sold" every bit as much as we are, and I'm thinking of a million examples but the easiest one to sum up is the example of porn: yes, men absolutely do need to know when the porn they consume is "art" not "life". Especially young teens who don't have enough "life" to compare it with.
Those are great questions, there. I could write a whole new post. ;)
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Plus le change...
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Journalism is a whole separate use of photography and I think the ethical gnashing of teeth is even more appropriate, today. But that's also why I think we have a responsibility to be literate readers of photos, and not simply trust and accept everything we're shown.
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Heh. I just had to go through an Art History video and put in a "ping" sound and an animated tab that said "Visual Literacy" every time the professor in the video said it. It must have been said at least 10 times. When I read the subject line I heard "ping!" in my head.
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I tend to think that critics who say that teenagers can't tell if something's been Photoshopped are selling them short- that kids understand a whole lot more than we think they do. So I'll check out those clips on Youtube. Maybe it's because I do editing in Photoshop on a regular basis, but it seems so divorced from reality that people would be actually *unaware* that photos are retouched.
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Enjoy YouTube...there's so much there on Photoshop, it's a real fun trip.
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ummm... yeah, what you said! Crikey, has the entire earth of earthlings gone mad? Or what?
I have three distinct photo-based jobs:
1) Photodocumentarian. My photos for the feds are supposed to be absolutely *as it were*. We have strict guidelines and are held to strict standards to ensure that when those photos go to the National Archives, they are as true a depiction as possible to the actual event. We are not supposed to crop, colorize, or add/delete anything from the original capture. It makes composing the photo a challenge, but it is what it is.
2) Photojournalist. For the paper, I have tremendous license to do just about anything possible to make a photo that will sell. Short of boldly or blatantly distorting the truth (which, in still photo work, I find tricky to do anyway) my editor will take just about anything interesting and in good taste. I crop, change color temps, enhance, delete, pretty much anything goes.
3) Freelance. Absolutely anything goes. Fashion, headshots, promos, proms, weddings.... I do absolutely anything that will sell. No holds barred.
Recently, I took a photo of a rather handsome young lady who happens to be Salvadorian and a friend's daughter. Beautiful. Except she is as flat chested as Kansas. I took a very striking shot of her on a beach in El Salvador and *plumped* her up a bit.... smoothed out her skin and whitened her teeth. The result is a portrait that is completely unnatural, yet gorgeous.
Nobody that buys my work... any of it... seems to have any notion that I do anything different than create art... whatever form it takes... from strictly nothing... to the "Universe... and beyond."
All Hail Photoshop!
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If you wanted to do some "creative editorial" work on a photo that you were selling as a Photodocumentarian (and I understand that you wouldn't, because you are ethical and also you probably want to keep that job), how much do you think you could get away with before anyone would notice? Not just enhancing boobs, but also stuff like removing a person from a background with rubberstamp, etc.
And, related question, have you ever had anyone looked at the work made wearing your "Freelance" hat and said "Whoah, wait, that's WAY too much. Make those boobs smaller, again."
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And yeah, they're pretty. That's part of the problem as I see it: we should be able to recognize the photoshop enhancement, but we also need to recognize that we -- or at least I -- am drawn to them because they're *pretty*
Anyway, your post also reminded me of something I read elsewhere. In this other post, "The Emaciation Proclamation," Professor Bean is arguing that maybe we're getting to a point where we can be liberated from the tyranny of these photos as ideal. We'd get there because the photoshopping has become so ridiculous that a model's waist is narrower than her jawline, for example.
Maybe if we got there, we could just say "ooh, pretty [if unrealistic] picture!" Kind of like we might say about a picture of a unicorn: pretty -- not real, but pretty.
So here it is: http://twobodysolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/the-emaciation-proclamation/#more-370
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