In Dorothy Wilding’s writings, extracted from In Pursuit of Perfect, she discusses her need for retouching in the business of portraiture. She explains that the purpose of retouching is not “to make a sitter more beautiful or handsome than she or he is in real life… it’s more to make a portrait a fairer representation of a sitter than it would be if the negative were left alone” (126). She goes on to explain that due to the harsh lighting necessary for capture a fleeting expression, all of the imperfections on a face are emphasized more than they would be if you saw this person in front of you.
While this may have been true in the film days, or when Wilding was writing this in 1958, I feel that the purpose of retouching today is completely different. Retouching, in advertising especially, has gotten to the point where it is done specifically for unrealistic beautification. Models seen in magazines and billboards often look nothing like the women that stood in front of the lens. Using photoshop, editors now have the power to change the size of a models’ eyes, legs, arms, etc, with a few clicks of the mouse. Dove, the beauty company, has made many videos exposing the horrifying truths of photoshop, showing a complete transformation from the model at the start of a photoshoot, and the finished, edited product in an advertisement. This phenomena has created completely unnatural and unobtainable standards of beauty for women looking at these photographs. (While these videos have only shown women, I do not doubt that there is some extreme photoshopping done to photos of men as well.)
A few companies are beginning to embrace untouched, natural beauty. About a year ago, Aerie, the underwear line owned by American Eagle, started a campaign entitled, “Aerie Real”. This campaign features untouched photos of average sized women with the words, “No supermodels, no retouching…because the real you is sexy”. For the first time in a long time, we are seeing stretch marks, tattoos, large freckles and bodies that more closely resemble real women. They have even created an “Aerie Real Bar Guide” that allows the shopper to click on their respectable size and see models that actually wear that size. While this system is not perfect and cannot perfectly represent every body type, I believe this is a large step in the right direction.
I think the advertising world needs to go back to a place closer to that of Dorothy Wilding, when retouching was only done to correct what the lighting had taken away.
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