Girlfriends love to forward each other Internet tidbits: inspirational stories, bawdy jokes, safety tips. This past summer, one such message generated quite a bit of cyber-buzz. “Way to go, Jamie!” it trumpeted, and provided a link to More magazine.
The big news was that Jamie Lee Curtis had posed in the magazine without makeup, styling and retouching. It was a way for the 43-year-old actress to thumb her nose at Hollywood’s culture of youth and, as she said in an accompanying interview, “to look the way God intends me to look.”
As heartily as fortysomething women cheered her, the actress is seemingly alone in her views. Although a few magazines, such as Britain’s The Face and ID, make it their stock in trade to run photos of models with blotchy skin and chewed-up fingernails, most fashion magazines rely on retouching to make pictures, well, picture perfect. Look at Vogue, Elle or the fashion shoots in Chicago magazine: The models’ skin, hair and clothes all are impeccable. Nothing is out of place.
Retouching photos happens “more frequently than people realize,” says Susan Mango Curtis, assistant professor of visual journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Magazines “want models to look perfect. They will take needle marks off model’s arms, anything that will take away from their beauty.”
Nearly every issue of Chicago magazine contains a retouched photo, says Randy Minor, art director at the monthly magazine. Minor reserves retouching mostly for fashion shoots that use paid models, but will touch up a photo of an interview subject if something’s drastically wrong, say a pimple or a bit of spinach in the person’s teeth. “We don’t want to embarrass anyone,” Minor says.
“It sounds like a bad thing to Photoshop, doesn’t it?” Minor says, using as a verb the name of the software used to retouch images digitally. “I feel guilty. It’s not my right to change an image that much.”
But artists have long fiddled with reality. The practice of manipulating reality is as old as art itself. Early portraitists, for instance, staked their reputations on painting subjects in the best possible light.
When Henry VIII commissioned Hans Holbein to paint a portrait of the king’s fourth wife, the homely Anne of Cleves, Holbein so feared his sponsor’s wrath that he depicted her richly embroidered dress more clearly than her face.
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and the practice of manipulation shifts to fashion magazine layouts. In the olden days, say 30 or 40 years ago, magazines employed airbrush artists to rid models of blemishes and other glamor don’ts.
“The retouch guy was the one who got rid of all the wrinkles,” says Bride Whelan, executive director of the New York-based Society of Publication Designers, a group whose membership includes art directors at high-style magazines.
A tedious process, airbrushing yielded less-than-perfect results. Says Mango Curtis, “You could tell something was different about the picture,” thanks to rough edges and out-of-kilter shadows.
No more. The advent of Photoshop and other digital tools has made retouching a flawless affair. Those “retouch guys” now can banish pimples, lengthen legs, enlarge breasts and change hair and skin color, all without the viewer catching on.
Retouching alone, however, does not a beautiful photo make. Part of what made the Jamie Lee Curtis shoot so groundbreaking is that Curtis eschewed the makeup artists and stylists that usually spend hours preparing subjects for a photo shoot, says Claudine Lorme, an art director at the advertising agency Cramer-Krasselt in Chicago.
Lorme also noted photo shoots get a boost from top models who know to angle their bodies so their legs look longer and their waists narrower. Photographers skilled in the use of light and shadows work wonders as well.
“When you do a photo shoot, you’re using elements of light, space and color to construct the best scenario for that person’s body,” she says.
Manipulating truth
Naturally (or unnaturally), the power to manipulate has led art directors to make a few unfortunate choices. Singer Toni Braxton was reportedly outraged when the hip-hop magazine Vibe altered a cover photo of her to replace her swimsuit with a towel, slim down her hips and make her breasts bigger. Vibe also created a cover image of rappers holding hands, a neat trick because a few of the singers in the picture were serving jail sentences at the time, Mango Curtis says. “There are no rules,” she says of photo manipulation. Curiously, people like Mango Curtis and Kenny Irby, visual journalism leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism watchdog group, don’t care what happens between the pages of entertainment or fashion magazines. What raises their hackles is the retouching of news photos.
Retouching “becomes a problem when the pursuit is documentary, or journalistic in nature, and the purpose is to inform the reader of something meaningful,” Irby says. The most egregious examples: Time’s portrayal of a dark, menacing-looking O.J. Simpson on its cover, and Newsweek’s picture of septuplets mom Bobbi McCaughey with beautiful, straight teeth.
While the McCaughey retouching might have been the work of a compassionate photo technician who thought McCaughey might welcome perfect teeth for her 15 minutes of fame, the practice is wrong, Mango Curtis says.
“It takes away credibility,” she says. “A photograph is a historic document. I don’t even like a lot of cropping. What’s seen through the viewfinder should be honored. We wouldn’t change the words of a story, would we? So why would we change the picture?”
Digital surgery
Such logic doesn’t fly at fashion or entertainment magazines, where celebrities often demand that their images be retouched to perfection.
“I like to say as a running joke that what you see in fashion and entertainment magazines is the equivalent of digital cosmetic surgery,” Irby says.
Famous people sometimes demand retouches that alter their looks drastically. Madonna, Irby says, once wanted her hair a different color on a Vogue magazine cover, but her schedule allowed no time for a coloring. So the magazine’s art director simply retouched her hair digitally.
The only reason Irby knew is that a friend leaked him before-and-after pictures.
As for fashion magazines, readers expect beautiful, flawless photos.
“At a pure visual communication level, people understand that [retouching] is done for visual effect,” Irby says.
Megan Cronin, a self-confessed fashion-magazine addict, agrees.
“I’m readily aware that the pictures have been altered. But if they weren’t, people would think they weren’t good photos,” says Cronin, 27, an account executive for an ad agency.
“It’s the runway versus real life: It’s something to strive for,” adds Cronin, who says she tapes ethereally perfect magazine pictures to her fridge door as an incentive to diet.
Lorme, too, expects perfection when she opens her latest issue of Vogue.
“You want to say wow, that’s beautiful, and that’s my initial reaction” to the photo, she says.
Retouching, Lorme adds, “is part of the art form of [fashion] photography.”
