Retoucher To The Stars
Ah yes, airbrushing, airbrushing, a favorite topic around here. This New Yorker article takes a fascinating look at Pascal Dangin, a retoucher so prized that famous photographers won’t work with anyone else, and who was name checked in The Devil Wears Prada.
“Her face is too high and elongated, mainly by the angle of the camera,” he said. “But I love her, too. I don’t want her to become someone else.” He zoomed in so that her eyeball was the size of a fifty-cent piece. “I love all of this little wrinkle”—laugh lines, staying put—“and the texture of skin. As you retouch skin, you can very quickly shift the tonal value. If you put a highlight where shadow used to be, you’re morphing the way the orbital socket is structured. It leads to a very generic look.” (Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest—higher, tighter—of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.)
I love the idea of “natural” looking retouching. And the reminder that the images we see in magazines, or even in our Flickr streams, are very carefully controlled renditions of human beauty and perfection.
Thanks to Inky for the link!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Art, Celebrities, Magazines, Media
“I don’t want her to become someone else” – I just want her to become someone else! Bee-yoo-tiful. I think that says it all, right?
Ahhhh, he did the retouching on the Dove Real Beauty campaign. I’m sort of wondering what they looked like in the first place . . .
I listened to a great piece on NPR the other day, and it diferentiated between the idea of photography for news’ sake and commercial photography. I’ve started thinking about commercial photography as something like painted portraits of previous centuries – the artist would often try to “improve” the image of the patron. It was beneficial in many ways to them.
The fashion, film, and advertising industries all live in a different world, in a way. What is “normal” for them has very little resemblance to what is considered “normal” in the real world. They are inundated with perfect-looking people, from whom they can pick and choose who is “lucky” enough to be a part of their campaign/movie/ whatever. And there are always thousands of other young, perfect, desperate people waiting in the wings to choose from.
So, airbrushing people until they look like aliens with removable heads? That’s just another day at the office for these folks.
Why do they have to airbrush in the first place?
I agree with Spinsterwitch’s point about commercial photography being simmilar to portrature in past earas. A lot of what comes out in a retouched photo (one done well, such as Dangin’s work) is what the artist sees in the subject, not just what is captured on camera. Does a photo show you how you are? Sometimes, but not often. Sometimes you can look at an untouched photo and it needs nothing to bring the subject out. Those kind of photos are hard to take after four hours of makeup and a wind machine. Everyone and everything is beautiful in some way, airbrushing is just a tool to capture beauty in a perminent image.
I am a retouch artist myself though, so I’m kinda biased.
Can I come out in favor of airbrushhing and photoshopping?
Because it beats the hell out of women torturing and mutilating their actual bodies to meet the insane standards currently in place.
And if you’ve ever been to the website “Photoshop Disasters”, you can really come to appreciate the people who are actually good at it.
Stephanie, I noticed that too. It was, apparently “challenging”; keepin’ it real, but not too real. Got to keep the marketing aspirational, you know. We might be able to have (shock! self-congratulatory pat on the back!) models who are ‘normal’ sized, but it won’t do for them to have cellulite or wrinkles.
Gabrielle: airbrushing is just a tool to capture beauty in a perminent image. Or to help set an unachievable standard.
whyme63 – Don’t you think it’s somewhat of a Catch-22, though? Don’t women torture and mutilate themselves so they can achieve the unachievable IMAGINARY images created by the retoucher?
The article says that in ONE SINGLE issue of Vogue, he had retouched 144 images! Why is “perfection” so necessary? Does a picture of a burger in a magazine EVER look like an actual burger that’s shoved out the window at McDonalds? Never. Same with the human body or face. We’re so enamored of ‘perfection’ that we actually begin to believe it’s possible to look like that. Maybe, just maybe, if we weaned ourselves off the airbrushing and allowed ourselves to see what things (not just people) REALLY look like, we could begin to appreciate the reality instead of always reaching for the unattainable.