Foods for thought - photography, Photoshop, and art as lie

[drwex]

I'm a photographer, of sorts. I love/hate Photoshop disasters as much as anyone. And there are reams to be written and said about how Photoshop body morphing has been used to distort and hypersexualize the female figure.

But there's also a lot to be said for the use of the tool to deal with things that should have been dealt with before the shot was taken. For example, the recent release of unretouched photos of Lady Gaga's Versace ads have gotten a great deal of noise. But what is the retouching doing?

It's making the wig look more like hair and less like a wig. Great. Should've been done by make-up before the shoot, but apparently that's Gaga's personal wig and they decided not to replace it. Photoshop covered up a bruise on her leg. Again, makeup should've handled that, but didn't. They've fixed the contrast and brightness. Guilty as charged - I do that with just about every picture of my own that I pass through Lightroom. A photographer more talented than I am might be able to get their light levels and contrasts just right and looking good on a glossy printed page, but not in a hurry or on a budget and deadline.

Yes, they also made Gaga's arms appear slimmer, but is that necessarily more of a lie? In a very cogent analysis for Vice.com, artist and former model Molly Crabapple points out that all photography is a form of lie:

Framing is a lie. Lighting is a lie. Cropping is a lie. When you suck in your stomach, or turn your head so the light washes out your laugh lines, you're lying as much as any liquefy tool. Untruth is baked into the process...

Crabapple also goes after Dove, which carefully restricts it notions of 'real' womens' bodies to "...smooth-skinned, able-bodied, fleshy but not fat." She is unsparing in reminding us that Photoshop's digital tools are modeled on the physical tools used for decades on film photographs - tools that shaped how we viewed Hollywood stars throughout the last century.

Crabapple's column, as a rant, is necessarily somewhat extreme. But I found her point of view refreshing.

Comments

[vibrantabyss.livejournal.com]

I would have been much more intrigued to see the same shot pre-and-post Photoshop, rather than two similar but clearly distinct ones. Probably as close as they can manage to collect, but who knows what was done between those two shots?

I'm not sure framing is a lie. I often consider it one of the few bits of art brought into a photo by the photog. The rest think is spot on. I can also understand the art-IS-lie philosophy. Then you can just argue over how many layers of lie are involved in each piece.

[drwex]

I think of framing as very important, particularly in what gets framed out of a shot. I've had multiple occasions in which a shot was improved by cropping out someone who was not the main focus of the picture. However, that happened to be the only image of that person I had captured. If I frame them out of the shot am I then creating the (false) impression that they were not present?

Or to take a more mundane situation - I crop my photos all the time to remove dead space. Along the way I often create the (false) impression that I was closer to the person/action/thing than I actually was.

Minor lies, to be sure, but lies nonetheless.

[vibrantabyss.livejournal.com]

Cropping I tend to think of as a cheat, where framing, being done in the moment, seems art to me. Maybe it is just a more artful lie. Even though they are similar, I look at them completely differently.

Thinking about music - I'm not sure I've consciously considered a musician an artist unless I've seen what they can do live acoustic, regardless of their normal performance mode. If you do 20 takes and mix tracks to make it sound good... the art isn't in the musicians, it's in the control booth.

[sariel-t.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the links. I enjoyed the reads.

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of a Chris Rock stand-up, in which he talks about the visual lie:
"Look at you. You got on heels, you ain't that tall. You got on makeup, your face don't look like that. You got a weave, your hair ain't that long. You got a Wonderbra on, your titties ain't that big....and you expect me to tell the truth?"