Atossa Abrahamian on Photoshop, celebrities, and the image of an image

Image via englishrussia.com

I can visualize how I would appear on the cover of Maxim: bigger breasts, slimmer thighs, flawless skin and a come-hither twinkle in my eyes. My veinless right hand would rest, elongated and with another woman’s nails, on a hip lacking flesh and bone. With my head flung back, my collarbone softened, someone else’s windswept hair would reveal a visage unrelated to twenty-two years of nail-biting, chocolate-eating, distance-running, and incurable clumsiness. This would hardly be a photograph—it would be the negation of my caricature, the visualization of an idea of me. But it would be designed for a public that, at least instinctively, takes such visualizations at face value—because they aren’t sketches or a sculpture or art, but images masquerading as photographs, masquerading as reality.

I expect that I would feel incredulous seeing myself reincarnated in this form; incredulous, but not altogether displeased. Liz Hurley, for instance, has said that she rather enjoys looking “thinner and younger.” She is quite candid about the extent to which her body is retouched, and about the “necessity” of the digital photo manipulations that lend her the requisite anatomical features of a bikini model.

Or the not-so-anatomical. Advertisements are designed to convince us that their photographs represent real women: perceptibly unreal backgrounds set off their bodies, sleek and agile. What is not immediately apparent is that these women are at times no more natural than the languid dawns behind them. In the case of Liz Hurley, this turns a 42-year old mother into the embodiment of today’s beauty standard. This is business as usual. In person, Liz Hurley is unlikely to comply with certain aesthetic requirements—the plasticine skin, for example, or the synthetic sheen of her inner-thigh. But when human anatomy is deemed inadequate, new forms are created: no longer to portray our image, but the image of our image.

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First released in 1990, Adobe Photoshop is the best known program used to bend and mold the images of bikini models (amongst others) —popular enough to spawn not only unofficial verbs, but subjunctive adjectives— “a photoshopped picture.” In Photoshop, tools like Liquefy push pixels in and out of a photograph seamlessly, simulating curves, removing volume, adding length, or smoothing lines. To experiment with Liquefy seems almost reminiscent of fashioning a golem. Begin with a lump, almost clay-like, and give it a somewhat human form. Streamline the neck and waist, and add legs, arms, and simulations of shoulders, knees and toes. You can go on forever perfecting your inanimate model; like an evolutionary flipbook, the changes, imperceptible at first, become drastic over time. The final creation ends up having more in common with a sculpture or a painting than what is generally believed to constitute a photograph.

If Liquefy is the computerized equivalent of an all-in-one liposuction, rhinoplasty, and facelift, other tools allow for full-on facial transplants. Features may come from a model her/himself, but captured from a different, more flattering angle. And if a model’s features are deemed unsalvageable, borrowed body parts—a hand, a foot, or a fingernail—make grafted cameos. Images of Liz Hurley may, in fact, be only 87% Liz Hurley, but the human eyes and mind are none the wiser. This may be a touch Frankensteinian—it’s also completely ubiquitous: while quite literally otherworldly, Hurley’s physique is hardly unique: you can see it replicated on every page of every fashion magazine at every newsstand in the country.

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Hurley has a blasé attitude towards being systematically altered. This is not unusual—the sheer omnipresence of the airbrush leads many models and actors to embrace being Photoshopped. And in general, transparency around the digital manipulation of photographs is growing. The development of computer programs that can detect pixel alterations has played an important role, as has America’s voyeuristic obsession with celebrity. Dozens of before-and-after shots revealing first drafts of people’s faces and bodies can now be found through a simple Google search; every week, any given tabloid will feature a rotating cast of guts, thighs, zits and wrinkles on their covers, inciting morbid fascination in a newly blemish-crazed public.

Last May, the New Yorker ran a profile of Pascal Dangin, the man behind the industry’s most elaborate image manipulations, and in 2007, the website Jezebel.com went as far as to offer $10,000 to whomever would leak the best un-retouched magazine cover (the winner was the July 07 issue of Redbook.) Somehow, the “before” shots —the actual photographs of celebrities, replete with their all too human flaws—have become part of the show. Features on the photoshopping of images will be surrounded by heavily modified faces, publicity shots, and the somehow blemish free visages of actors brooding over a soon to open movie title. I can’t help but feel that this is somehow comparable to a sentence declaring its own falsehood.

It has been argued that un-retouched content would not sell, and that unreality is more appealing than a perfectly attractive representation of the truth. Feminists are probably right, moreover, to cite photoshopping as an element of female objectification, and the institutionalization of impossible beauty standards. But all of this simply begs the question of why we are dissatisfied with the human Liz Hurley. Perhaps it is enough to say that it may be as human to airbrush as it is to err—and that our attempts to improve and re-create ourselves in an idealized has given rise, on paper or on the internet, to images we cannot help but want to emulate in the flesh. Call it the airbrush paradox: we know that Liz Hurley does not really look like Liz Hurley, but we still want to resemble Liz Hurley. Even Liz Hurley wants to look like Liz Hurley.

—Atossa Abrahamian

Atossa Abrahamian is a translator and writer based in Brooklyn and Geneva.