Airbrushing
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Jennifer Arrington (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/06/22
I want to bring to your attention the idea of airbrushing. Airbrushing is something that is done in the midst of a lot of mainstream photography for fashion models, especially the more prominent ones including the ones that you can see on common magazines, or in gas stations, or even tabloid magazines at the grocery store. Airbrushing is in essence of the manipulation of the photograph to provide a more appealing photo to norms and standards in society – which may have some basis in biology and evolutionary theory – that is different than the original photograph. It’s a sort of visual lie. For instance, this can include making a model look skinnier, more fit, younger, and so on and so forth. It can include making a woman model have an hourglass figure. It can include the removal of aging marks or moles, or the smoothing over of cellulite, and so on. It can include the removal of excess weight in “unpleasant” places. And on and on. I like the fact that Karma Trik uses real models and do not give that visual lie that comes from the visual manipulation seen in an airbrushed photograph. The more important fact relates to the fact that these models lack the manipulation of the photo and, therefore, I would argue, they do not lie about their appearance or their looks on the page, whether a webpage or a magazine page. That’s a good thing, I think. It may not appeal to cultural norms and sensibilities for citizens, but this is something that might feed into, in a small way and modest way at the start, more reasonable expectations about what people really look like rather than these strange airbrushed creatures. People look like a lot of different things. People come in all shapes and sizes. The fact that there’s one ideal is likely based in biology – but changes according to context as well and, I think, that does not necessarily mean that that then, therefore, limits the entire landscape of modeling to one form or a set of people that best approximate that form who then get paid millions of dollars. There are other issues to do with expectations of women’s bodies, but they’re also modern gender equality wishes to do with simply broadening the landscape of expectations by the broadening of the landscape of modeling of women, and this would equally apply to the men, by the way, but with different considerations.
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