Two things upthread I'd like to respond to:
... the point is that for the artist it's about the image, and presenting the best, most attractive image possible with the technology at hand. As an artist, I have trouble with the idea of restricting a photo editor's tools or censoring his art because of the message it might send... but that's a tangential point really.
Hmmmm....I guess I'm kind of skeptical of this comment, and I don't regard it as tangential, because it seems to imply that these images are the independent creations of free-floating, culturally-uninfluenced "artistes" out there, making art of celebrities purely for the joy of it.
For me a great deal is dependent on context, I suppose, and most of this "art" is produced primarily for profit, and that fact matters. So, I disagree with Smoothly that the thread has implied that all the ills caused by representations of beauty are being located in or conflated with the touching-up of editorial photography. I think that's an assumption you're bringing to this discussion. I don't see people claiming that "all" the ills of aesthetic norms result from digital manipulation.
However, let me try to be more specific about where I specifically stand re; digital manipulation (DM) of images. Photoshop is a tool that can used for a variety of purposes, artistic and commercial and, it must be admitted, fraudulent purposes. (I assume we all accept that, right?)
My point, then, is that when you introduce DM into a commercial setting, there's a lot of room for ethical ambiguity. It's quite possible that many uses of the the technology are for art, and I am not here suggesting that the use of DM should be banned or censored, but people definitely need to be aware of the extent to which it is used in commercial "speech," and repeatedly reminded of it through physical examples like the website cited above. (And by reading Susan Bordo, I think, 'cause she's really brilliant on this topic.)
(In that context, I would like to point out, that IIRC, the only people here who have suggested that this discussion is about "banning" digital manipulation is, it seems to me, the people who are defending it against virtually any critique. Thus, while this is perhaps not fair, Smoothly's and Ibis's stance strikes me a bit the same as the "political correctness gone MAAAD" position, where serious questions about a specifical cultural practice are labeled censorship as a form of evasion.)
Let me give an exampe of a clear ethical gray area specifically involving digital manipulation of a celebrity image, this famous picture of O.J. Simpson:
In this picture, taken shortly after OJ's arrest, his face was famously darkened and made to look more "sinister" which Time defended for "artistic" reasons.
Here's the Wikipedia account: Notably, Time published an edition featuring an altered mugshot, darkening his skin and reducing the size of the prisoner ID number. This appeared on newsstands right next to an unaltered picture by Newsweek. Outcry from minority rights groups followed. Time illustrator Matt Mahurin was the one to alter the image, saying later that he "wanted to make it more artful [sic], more compelling."
If I recall correctly, much was made in the media discussions of the fact that even US news magazines regard the cover of the magazine not as part of the "news" but as, in essence, an ad to sell the magazine. But readers, by and large, were not making that distinction. So, note, this is not a "will someone please think of the children!!!" moment: this is about adults as well, feeling that DM was used unethically to play into deeply sedimented ideas about race and gender (specifically, the race and gender of a black male) AND that the unethical use of the technology had asymmetrical effects on relatively disempowered groups: i.e., that this DM was playing into racist beliefs and ideas in ways that may not be immediately "measurable" in their effects, but which were real.
To me, this instance speaks to the ulitmately politically-conservative nature of media that is directly dependent on consumer-based capitalism. It's true that the examples on the site that began this thread were largely, so far as I can tell, celebrity shots that serve a pretty different purpose than the TIME magazine cover. I do not equate the two things, by any means, and I'm not calling for censorship.
I am saying that I believe this kind of manipulation in a capitalist system is a form of propoganda. It is virtually always going to be conservative in its impulse (obviously there will be exceptions, ones that are more clearly "artistic" in their purpose, I suspect). Bottom line: it is hard for people of ANY age, even well-educated adults, even me, to be fully aware of how powerful and pervasive this propoganda is, because it is often invisible, and how it may contribute to reinforcing hurtful stereotypes. |
