A
young ballet dancer from Maine gathered 25,000 signatures in protest against
Photoshopped images and presented them to Ann Shoket, editor-in-chief
of Seventeen. In defense, the magazine said in a statement, "We
feature real girls in our pages and there is no other magazine that highlights
such a diversity of size, shape, skin tone and ethnicity."
When a teenage girl flips through the pages of Seventeen magazine, they see what is real — no more
Photoshopped pictures of unrealistic body images. The magazine has pledged
to keep their images real after 14-year-old Julia Bluhm gathered a group of girls to protest and boycott the magazine for
tweaking pictures instead of showing what is really beautiful.
However,
when trying to target Teen Vogue for the same issue,
the group of young girls did not get the same reaction from the editors. The
magazine, which has a circulation of more than 1 million readers, did not agree
to the “Body Peace Treaty.” Instead, they gave copies of Teen Vogue to the
girls protesting to take home.
If
magazines like Seventeen and Teen Vogue, as well as other fashion and lifestyle
magazines, have been able to get away with manipulating images to sell more,
how can we believe anything we see anymore? Photoshopped photos show a “perfect
picture.” It makes women feel dissatisfied with themselves because women compare
to what they see in the magazines they read.
It sells creams, plastic surgery, make up, clothing, hair
treatments, gym memberships, and even more magazines! It sells all kinds of
things to imperfect people seeking the same kind of illusionary perfection.
Perfect one-dimensional pictures that have no bearing on a person’s inner
beauty.
Just as story telling can portray the truth with an accurate
accounting of the facts, it could just as easily become fiction with a few
changes. Fake and manipulated photographs began circulating no longer after the
invention of photography.
When photography was first invented, it overwhelming power
came from the fact that it recorded nature more realistically than any other
art form had ever done before. What happened to that, though?
Correcting, manipulating and enhancing images in Photoshop
(or any other image editing program), we must deal with question of both ethics
and aesthetics. Ethics are a set of rules that we invent that define what we
think is good and bad. Aesthetics, on the other hand, deal with the nature of
beauty, art and taste, and things that are pleasing in appearance.
With digital processing, there is almost no limit to what
can be done to an image, and many things are done to images with the best intentions.
The problem is that the pursuit of aesthetics often violates our ethics.
Changes can be made to images that are undetectable, so much
so that there is now discussion that photographs will no longer be allowed as
evidence in courts of law. Viewers know full well that anything can be done to
an image these days.
If you add something that wasn’t there in the original scene
in movies, you’ve crossed the line from a documentary art form into a fictional
one. This may or may not be OK in some cases, depending on what your purpose
is. So, when it comes down to it, the important questions when we manipulate an
image are, why are we doing this, and what are our purposes and intentions?
In the end, manipulation of photos becomes a problem and a
question of ethics when the artist or photographer leis about his motivations,
methods, an conclusions and presents images with the purpose of intentionally
deceiving the viewer.
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