Sure we airbrush, but so what? This isn't journalism, says Self editor
Editors shouldn't apologize for retouching cover subjects, says the editor-in-chief of Self magazine. In a posting on her blog, Lucy Danziger says that Self's portraits are not meant to be unedited or true-to-life snapshots. “This is art, creativity and collaboration. It's not, as in a news photograph, journalism. It is, however, meant to inspire women to want to be their best. That is the point,” she wrote.Self got some flack for the September issue cover featuring Kelly Clarkson, which was airbrushed and color corrected but not, Danziger said, photoshopped. (Danziger confessed that she has even had her art directors shave a bit off her hips from a published picture of her running in a marathon. "I am confident in my body, proud of what it can accomplish, but it just didn't look the way I wanted in every picture," she wrote.)
Labels: covers
posted by D. B. Scott at
5:20 pm
7 Comments:
How do doctored images inspire women to want to be their best? Their best what? Fake version of themselves? Maybe it's not journalism, but that doesn't mean that they can be irresponsible. Images that are heavily re-touched reinforce an impossible standard of beauty – so impossible that it needs to be digitally created by art directors. Great message for young women.
Wow, I found this post really depressing. It's one thing to make sure the subject looks her level best -- choose the most flattering lighting, makeup, clothes, etc -- but in a magazine devoted to helping women become their healthiest/'best' selves, extensive airbrushing seems hypocritical -- ie, even the women they choose to profile as inspiration aren't up to snuff, so they artificially fix them up, and the editors even retouch their own photos? Ew.
I disagree. What's really depressing is how fat Kelly Clarkson has let herself become. As a celebrity, there are now certain responsibilities that one must uphold, and not porking out is one of them -- everybody loses. It just not seemly.
(And Rosalynn, no one says "airbrushing" anymore.)
To be fair to Rosalynn, I used the word airbrushing in the headline of the original post, as did the article referred to and the Photoshop tool is routinely called an airbrush.
Ha! it's all I've got.
There is no Airbrush tool in Photoshop, it's an option for any brush tool. Cloning, warping, liquifying, painting and myriad other options are available to the retoucher, but "airbrushing" as it's commonly understood does not exist in digital retouching anymore.
Thanks Poindexter
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