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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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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