I have one seriously silly guilty pleasure: fashion magazines. I like the glossy pages, the colorful editorials, the neat articles on what's new and hot right now. But there's one aspect I could certainly live without: retouching. Sure, a brightened photo could improve text readability, and eliminating distracting items from photos is great, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about body retouching. Slimming down models and average folks, drawing on features, cutting away and adding at will. People look at photos and want to think: "this is reality," that's part of the beauty of photography, it captures real moments! But retouching has destroyed that assumption. Not only that, but retouching of photos of people leads to body-image distortion for the rest of the world. Think how different we would see ourselves if everyone in media looked real, not photo shopped.
I saw an interesting article on one of my favorite magazines (Glamour)'s website, in which an ancient painting of Venus (the goddess known for beauty etc.) was photoshopped using today's standards. The two photos, one original and one doctored show significant differences in the goddesses' waist, arms, legs and hips. It's interesting to only to see how the "ideal beauty" has changed over time (today's ideal woman is more athletically built), but how photoshopping has grown to be such a mainstay of media production. Frankly, when it comes to beauty, I think real is always better than artificial.
Here's the article:
http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-g/2012/03/body-image-when-ancient-art-ge.html
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