Here is a New York Times Op-Ed Video (that won’t let me embed it) called Sex, Lies, and Photoshop.
I also wanted to feature one of the many amazing comments in a thread about this video on Jezebel:
philoclea: @Dez.demona: Way to catch the most disturbing aspect of that video. That was really beyond someone with skewed ideals of beauty saying, “She’s too fat” or “Her nose is too big.” That was someone saying, “This woman looks too strong. She cannot be feminine.”
Honestly, I feel like someone on here has, at some point, said that these mags and the fashion industry promote thin women because they’re promoting powerlessness among women, and as much as I believe it, I always think it sounds a little too much like a feminist critique [Ian: Interesting, but popular opinion on feminism. People are very wary of this word.]. But to hear someone say it, just like that, and not from a feminist point of view but from a, “Wow, this woman is so powerful and fit — that’s not what we want to advertise” perspective. Fucking blew my mind AND pissed me off, at the same damn time.
Here’s a trailer for a documentary by the same author, Jesse Epstein. The short film can be streamed here.
To those of you involved in creating photographic images, none of this will surprise you.
Advertising images selling false bodies, false realities is nothing new, but I’m always happy to see attention to it in mainstream media. I hope to catch Jessie’s documentary at some point. I recommend checking all this stuff out and subscribing to her blog.
Even if we take these things to be obvious, take fabricated images for granted – we can also always benefit by being aware of their nature. It’s often surprising to me that people can’t tell something has been retouched. After just a few short conversations with most people, they’re right there with me looking at images in malls and magazines and pointing out the subtle clues. It can become a game, but I think it’s deadly serious in many aspects.
Even before excessive retouching we were living in a society of the spectacle (everything seems to relate back to Debord these days.)