Dear Demi Moore,
I know that you’re taking a lot of heat lately for the cover of W. Some people think a huge chunk of your hip is missing. As someone who has worked with fashion photography and digital manipulations for years, it just looks to me like your in contrapposto stance. You were photoshopped, but your hips weren’t the only target. It was the entirety of the image.
Fashion photographers as wildly successful as Mert and Marcus digitally alter the images themselves before handing it off to the client. Mert and Marcus are pioneers when it comes to digital manipulation.
Photos are pre-prepped for final hand off with airbrushing, cropping, neck and torso lengthening, color correction and overall artistic interpretation before they’re handed over to the client. What you’re posting as an original image is the work after the studio does the manipulations. It’s their contribution before handing it off to the client’s art department.
The photo is a brilliant combination of good source material (you), great makeup, lighting, angles, wardrobe… and Photoshop. By the time this photo made it to you and the client, you’d been airbrushed, de-wrinkled, had skin blemishes removed, eye whites lightened, eyes enlarged, teeth whitened, and makeup enhanced. Even though you are thin, I can almost guarantee you that someone saw some problem areas that could be “improved”. They saw clavicles, cheekbones, jawline, muscle tone and neck that could all be “a little more defined” and they did it.
Even more proof that this photo is not an original raw image, when you overlay the W cover and the original, they meet up just about perfectly. That almost never happens when comparing a raw original to a cover.
–End Correspondence–
But that’s not what bothers me, those are the artistic interpretations that every designer has made at some point. We traffic in aspirational imagery. What bothers me is trying to keep the illusion up that a 47 year old woman would look exactly like a 25 year old. She wouldn’t and she can still be beautiful.
It’s bothering me that people would argue that Demi Moore “just has good genes and works out.” The rest of our genes aren’t bad. The rest of us also don’t have 4 hours of professional makeup done to our faces and bodies, aren’t placed under professional lighting, and then have 150 photos of ourselves snapped, until we get the perfect 30 that make it through to the lightening round to choose the one.
That photo isn’t then sent to processing with professional retouching so that we can post pictures to our blogs, driver’s licenses, or photo albums. That’s how the aspirational fashion imagery works. This is the product of the marriage of good talent, not good genes. The ridiculousness of saying, “But I really do look like this?” with regard to fashion photography is like a lump of half-sculpted clay expressing that it had no help from the sculptor in the sculpture it will become.
I understand that attitude because people like Demi Moore make their living on their images. So, there’s a real hard push to keep the illusion up, because they are profitable products. Very few of us have Pascal Dangin’s on call, but many celebrities do.
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If you want an even better laugh, check out the ad for her perfume. Her face is completely devoid of any lines or shadows, even those that any adolescent has. Does she think we’re stupid? I’m greatly offended by this photoshop madness. I think we women should boycott anyone who engages in it, in the end we’re the ones who are harmed by it (because we’re measured against an unachievable standard).
I’m pretty sure most of you will have already seen this, but here’s a video about distorted perceptions of beauty in the media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U . It was pretty alarming for me, the first time I saw it; not being in design or advertising or anything like that, I knew people in magazines and ads were Photoshopped, but I had never actually seen it happen before.
You know, someone posted in the Fatshionista LJ community about how disappointed she was in all her photos. How they seemed to add 30 pounds, make her look sweaty, etc. And a few people were like, “Sorry to break it to you, but that’s what you look like! The camera doesn’t lie. What you see in photos is how other people see you!!!”
Uh… Yeah. No. One of the big issues is that the above semi-Demi is what we’re used to seeing in photos. Part of the reason the camera seems to add 10 (or 30) pounds is that we are used to seeing even thin people slimmed down in pictures.
One thing I hate about all this is that Demi Moore apparently feels that attacks on a highly constructed and completely artificial photograph of her body are actually attacks on Demi herself. It makes me want to give her a big hug.
Cameras don’t necessarily lie (although photographers have ways of making them not always tell the whole truth) but they don’t see things quite the way we do:
Does the camera really add ten pounds?