Tag Archives: photoshop

The Perfect Body Is a Lie

Laurie and Debbie say:

Fashion models are, almost by definition, people with “perfect bodies.” That’s how they get chosen. Bodybuilders have become, for a large segment of the populace, the symbol of a different kind of “perfect body.” Let’s take a look behind that perfection.

Bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman, in oxygen mask, just after the Mr. Olympia competition

Coleman, stepping off the stage after a competition, is dependent on supplemental oxygen. “The strain of intense dieting, dehydration and muscle-flexing,” says Zed Nelson (who took the picture) “places high levels of strain on the heart and lungs, rendering many contestants dizzy, light-headed and weak.”

So, the image we see on the stage, of a man who has refined his body and built up his strength in a way we can envy and wish to achieve (or come close to), is a lie.

Lisa Wade at Sociological Images paired this image of Coleman with a photograph of Victoria’s Secret Angel, Adriana Lima, who discussed her pre-shoot regimen in a recent interview.

For the last three weeks, she’s been working out twice a day. “It is really intense, it’s not really the amount of time you spend working out, it’s the intensity: I jump rope, I do boxing, I lift weights, but I get bored doing that. If I am not moving I get bored very easily.”

She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show, she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show, she will abstain from the daily gallon of water, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely.

“No liquids at all so you dry out, sometimes you can lose up to eight pounds just from that,” she says.

Lisa’s point is that “Bodybuilders and models, then, represent aesthetic extremes of masculinity and femininity, but their bodies aren’t the natural extension of male and female physicalities. Instead, achieving the look requires significant sacrifice of one’s body.”

In other words, like the bodybuilder’s strength, the model’s health, attractiveness, and desirability are a lie. Trust us, she’s nowhere near so desirable when she’s drinking her daily gallon of water, or parching herself to drop eight pounds in twelve hours.

In this context, it’s heartening to read Chloe at Feministing, writing about Norway’s minister of equality, Audun Lysbakken (why doesn’t the U.S. have a secretary of equality?), who “is pushing for advertisers to begin disclosing when their billboards have been retouched.”

Ralph Lauren poster of an impossibly skinny woman

Similar campaigns have happened in the United Kingdom and France, and some ads have even been banned in the U.K. for being excessively retouched.

Lysbakken and her counterparts in other countries are trying to make sure everyone sees and notices what many of us already know–pictures like the one just above are a complete, total, and irredeemable lie.

As Chloe points out, awareness of retouching and Photoshop is not sufficient. Many young women who understand that the images are photoshopped still want to look like the resulting picture.

Forcing advertisers to reveal their lies would likely have the secondary effect of having fewer advertisers use retouched photographs. And having fewer deceitful images out there would help change people’s goals. Similarly, revealing just how much models and bodybuilders wear out and destroy their bodies so they can pretend to “perfection” can help us all re-evaluate what we really want to look like–and what it would cost.

It’s Photoshop! No, it’s 1864 …

Laurie says:

We think about photo manipulation as very now, but actually it’s as old as photography.

I started thinking about this after reading in the NY Times a few weeks ago that Robert Capa’s famous Spanish Civil War photo “Falling Soldier” may very well have been faked.

After nearly three-quarters of a century Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War remains one of the most famous images of combat ever. It is also one of the most debated, with a long string of critics claiming that the photo, of a soldier seemingly at the moment of death, was faked. Now, a new book by a Spanish researcher asserts that the picture could not have been made where, when or how Capa’s admirers and heirs have claimed.

If true,  this violates the most fundamental standards of 20th century documentary photography. Images are  supposed to be real. There may be choices of composition like the famous Tienanmen Square photo, where the crowds of people in the park are composed out and the man confronts the tank in isolation. But the image itself is supposed to be untainted.

Alexander Gardner documented the American Civil War. Both he and Mathew Brady arranged their photos of battlefield dead as art. This was acceptable at at time when painting was the standard, not objective journalism.

(The rest of the quotes are from Wikipedia)

One of his most famous images, ‘Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter’ is a complete fabrication, Gardner and his assistants Timothy O’Sullivan and James Gibson having dragged the sniper’s body 40 yards, into the more photogenic surrounds of the Devil’s Den in order to create a better composition.

It was intended to be a deeply commemorative image and he would have said that a ‘higher’ reality was the point.

The Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander used a very different technique for his scandalous photograph ‘The Two Ways of Life’.

This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks.

Both of these are part of the 19th photography art movement called Pictorialism.

Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures made were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes.

All of this sounds a lot like Photoshop, except that it often takes very high levels of 19th century technical skills – skills that were limited to a small number of people.  And as with Photoshop today, anything goes.

There are endless questions on art, truth, “reality” and ethics and different times answer them differently. In the next few months I’m going to write rather explicitly about my own methods and standards.