Today, my favorite photographer Natalie Norton, posted this on her Facebook page:
This is fascinating to me (the kind of fascinating that leaves me with a pit in my stomach). I would never have noticed had the magazines not been shelved side by side. Obviously, the respective images are from the same photo shoot...but the digital manipulation of the one on the left (US) is extreme in comparison to the one on the right (People—which, more than likely, was also manipulated to some extent). Some of the details are hard to see given the quality and glare of my silly iPhone photo, so I'll point them out for you:
Left: wrinkles retouched, eye size and shape altered, face size/shape altered (particularly face width and jaw bone), nose shape altered, hair band removed, hair style altered and smoothed, necklace lengthened, and it's hard to tell from the angle, but it looks as though her breasts were also enhanced slightly in the image on the left...
Please show this to your children—especially, but not exclusively, your teenagers. I believe the younger we start training our children to recognize that what they see is generally not (read: "almost never is") an accurate representation of reality, the less likely they are to grow up to become teenagers and adults who are aspiring for biologically impossible portrayals of perfection. They deserve to know what we (I) did not—that what they will be tempted to strive for, lust after, spend their money trying to become and obtain is contrived—they're being lured into a dangerous world by the smoke and mirrors of beauty.
I struggled with disordered eating in high school and into my early years of college. When I was about 20 yrs old, in an effort to get wholly well, I made a commitment to stop looking at tabloid magazines. Not just to stop buying them, but to stop picking them up and flipping through them under any circumstance, on any occasion. This simple commitment made a HUGE difference in my life. My perception of reality began to shift, little by little, and my self image began to change. Over time, I found that I was no longer holding myself to an impossible standard of (digitally manipulated) perfection. There was much more that went into my healing, of course, but this first step sincerely changed my life.
Get this: "One study found that one in four people is depressed about their body, another found that almost a third of women say they would sacrifice a year of life to achieve the ideal body weight and shape. . . These very real and serious issues are not helped by the impossible visions of perfection everywhere in our visual culture. A growing body of scientific evidence reinforces the link between negative body image and exposure to idealized images." — Jo Swinson for CNN.com
SACRIFICE A YEAR OF THEIR LIVES?! It's shocking, but I can say, with no hesitation, that there was a period in my life where I would have ABSOLUTELY taken that offer had it been available to me. It sickens me to think that I was ever in a space where I would have felt so desperately ashamed and unworthy, because I had been conditioned to accept as real a completely distorted ideal.
Talk about this with your kids. Let's save the next generation from this completely unnecessary suffering and pain—heaven knows they already have enough to worry about.
Left: wrinkles retouched, eye size and shape altered, face size/shape altered (particularly face width and jaw bone), nose shape altered, hair band removed, hair style altered and smoothed, necklace lengthened, and it's hard to tell from the angle, but it looks as though her breasts were also enhanced slightly in the image on the left...
Please show this to your children—especially, but not exclusively, your teenagers. I believe the younger we start training our children to recognize that what they see is generally not (read: "almost never is") an accurate representation of reality, the less likely they are to grow up to become teenagers and adults who are aspiring for biologically impossible portrayals of perfection. They deserve to know what we (I) did not—that what they will be tempted to strive for, lust after, spend their money trying to become and obtain is contrived—they're being lured into a dangerous world by the smoke and mirrors of beauty.
I struggled with disordered eating in high school and into my early years of college. When I was about 20 yrs old, in an effort to get wholly well, I made a commitment to stop looking at tabloid magazines. Not just to stop buying them, but to stop picking them up and flipping through them under any circumstance, on any occasion. This simple commitment made a HUGE difference in my life. My perception of reality began to shift, little by little, and my self image began to change. Over time, I found that I was no longer holding myself to an impossible standard of (digitally manipulated) perfection. There was much more that went into my healing, of course, but this first step sincerely changed my life.
Get this: "One study found that one in four people is depressed about their body, another found that almost a third of women say they would sacrifice a year of life to achieve the ideal body weight and shape. . . These very real and serious issues are not helped by the impossible visions of perfection everywhere in our visual culture. A growing body of scientific evidence reinforces the link between negative body image and exposure to idealized images." — Jo Swinson for CNN.com
SACRIFICE A YEAR OF THEIR LIVES?! It's shocking, but I can say, with no hesitation, that there was a period in my life where I would have ABSOLUTELY taken that offer had it been available to me. It sickens me to think that I was ever in a space where I would have felt so desperately ashamed and unworthy, because I had been conditioned to accept as real a completely distorted ideal.
Talk about this with your kids. Let's save the next generation from this completely unnecessary suffering and pain—heaven knows they already have enough to worry about.
Natalie's observations, comments, and the ensuing conversation has sparked some thought in my old brain, and I wondered about the thoughts/rights of the photographer. My guess is the person who actually took this image/or images is NOT the same person who manipulated it to drop into their respective magazines. I wondered how much control of an image a photographer actually has after they sell it to a purchasing company. I wondered if there was some way, contractually, for a photographer to obligate magazines to represent a photographic image honestly, without being allowed to manipulate it, or if such a contract would put that photographer out of work. Interesting thoughts, interesting conversation. I'm curious to hear what you have to say on the matter.
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