Controversial Images

Media Representations on the Edge

Feona Attwood, Vincent Campbell, I.Q. Hunter, Sharon Lockyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137291998
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Offering a series of case studies of recent media controversies, this collection draws on new perspectives in cultural studies to consider a wide variety of images. The book suggest how we might achieve a more subtle understanding of controversial images and negotiate the difficult terrain of the new media landscape.

Part I

Controversy and Representation

1

Media-Bodies and Photoshop

Meredith Jones

Far from being defanged in the modern era, images are one of the last bastions of magical thinking.

(Mitchell 2005:128)

[A]ny understanding of contemporary visual mediation that ignores software does so at its own peril, in an age when cinema has become synonymous with Final Cut Pro, photography with Photoshop, writing with Microsoft Word, and on and on.

(Galloway 2006: 321)

We have always adjusted photographs to suit different temporal and spatial moments: their borders morph as we snip or rip to remove unsavoury elements – the ex-husband, the child who became a criminal, the awful handbag. Photographic imagery is made from what lurks outside the frame as much as by what is contained within it. And yet, photography’s own mythology tells a different story: that something complete has been captured. Even as we know that outside every image hover ignored or invisibilized ‘truths’ we still hold onto a cultural belief that photography offers a direct link to the real. Photoshop and other image-manipulating software programs magnify tensions around photography’s connection to the factual. For in Photoshop what is in the frame, from the start, is adjusted and manipulated. As soon as an image has been touched by a Photoshop tool it is augmented, reduced, enhanced or changed in some way. And increasingly, all of our important global images are photoshopped: we now expect that adjustment has happened, even as we continue to demand that photographs represent the real.

This chapter explores this tension via three controversial photoshopped images of women’s bodies: the nude picture of Simone de Beauvoir on the cover of Nouvel Observateur (January 2008), the Ralph Lauren campaign featuring heavily photoshopped images of model Filippa Hamilton-Palmstierna (October 2009) and the Dove Evolution video (2006). The de Beauvoir image was thought by many to have been used inappropriately given the philosopher’s eminent place in intellectual history. That it had been photoshopped was less controversial at the time, but is the focus here. The Hamilton-Palmstierna image was controversial because it had been so heavily photoshopped it hardly resembled a real body anymore. The Dove video made a provocative and somewhat political statement about the use of Photoshop in beauty and fashion media, explicitly linking this to women’s and girls’ poor body image.

I preface the arguments presented here with a clear statement that all vision is media-laden. By this I mean that seeing is always mediated, whether we are considering the particular capabilities and limitations of the human eye, the frame and physical protection provided by the plate glass window, or the views provided by the ubiquitous big and little screens that populate the contemporary world. In turn, every image is both physically and metaphorically ‘framed’ – constructing its narrative through processes of inclusion and omission. Thus, image-making becomes a profoundly political act. As Judith Butler writes, ‘although restricting how or what we see is not exactly the same as dictating a storyline, it is a way of interpreting in advance what will and will not be included in the field of perception’ (2009: 66).

This theoretical position – that technologies of vision interpret and create the ways we see and even what we are able to see – leads to a slightly more complex concept, namely, that technologies of vision do not simply represent or reflect existing objects but also play a role in bringing them into being. Alexander Styhre, pace Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, argues that matter itself can be understood to be created through the use and implementation of ‘specific technological systems and visual media’ (2010: 66). If matter is only perceived via biological or material mechanisms, it therefore follows that it is made in conjunction with those mechanisms. So, rather than trying to determine whether an image is ‘accurate’ or not it is far more useful to think about how it was created and what it creates. As Styhre concludes in relation to Barad’s (2003) analytical framework, it ‘invites us to think of visualization in fresh terms, in terms of the possibilities accomplished on the basis of a visual medium rather than its accuracy in a realist epistemology’ (2010: 66).

Here I suggest that bodies, as matter, are in some sense brought about through media.¹ I explore how bodies and media configure each other and specifically ask how ‘media-bodies’ come about in the age of Photoshop.

Photography, Photoshop and the real

[D]igital technology does not subvert ‘normal’ photography, because ‘normal’ photography never existed.

(Manovich 2003: 245)

Photography, unlike painting or drawing, is thought by many to be ‘a mirror with a memory’. Whereas painting ‘has always vacillated in a zone between the real and the symbolic’ (Bazin 2005: 10–12), photography alone, of all the representative and visual technologies, has been characterized as having the power to relate an unadulterated, unemotional and objective truth. Film theorist André Bazin summarizes this line of belief usefully:

[O]riginality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.

(2005: 13)

The belief in photography as truth-teller happened in part because photo graphic techniques came of age in parallel with post- enlightenment science. The two supported each other’s claims to be reason-based and objective: ‘at the moment of its birth, photography was explicitly understood in relation to this prestigious notion of modern vision, and was widely recognized as the modernization by science of its own privileged vision’ (Slater 1995: 221).

Thus photography, a medium lauded for its accurate, technical and objective rendering of how things appear, has been and is still widely experienced as being fundamentally connected to the real. This has been cause for major philosophical questionings and critiques (Sontag 1977; Baudrillard 2009; Butler 2009). It has also meant that photography, as a medium, has often faded into the background, even disappeared, as its content takes centre stage. According to artist Silvia Kolbowski, ‘It is the unself-conscious assumption of a realist discourse about photography that allows for the mediation of the medium to recede’ (1990: 154). The introduction of digital photography along with image-manipulating programs like Photoshop has meant that photography’s intimate ties with truth and reality have been more explicitly called into question. In 1990, the year Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released, photography critic Fred Ritchin wrote:

[A]s the public begins to perceive photography as unreliable, those who control its uses should clearly understand what they are doing to the photograph. They should address both the question of image manipulation by the computer and the more general tendency to use photographs to illustrate preconceived ideas and self-fulfilling prophesies.

(1990: 36–7)

Adobe’s Photoshop is a computer software used to edit, manipulate and create images. It has been through 11 versions over the last 20 years, is available in 25 languages and its tools are now applied to most still images in mass media.² In Photoshop images can be cropped or extended and unique environments can be created. The software is widely available and professional training is not needed to make basic use of it: an hour’s experimentation allows one to remove spots and wrinkles, elongate and narrow bodies, change skin tone and eye colour. The word Photoshop has entered the general lexicon and the verb ‘to photoshop’ is widely used to denote processes of retouching, compositing and general digital manipulation, even when it has occurred in other programs.

Discussions about Photoshop, especially as it relates to images in the mass media, often go hand in hand with discussions about photography. But Photoshop is a medium in its own right, particularly for its ability to create (in the hands of skilled practitioners) unique images with little or no connection to an original photo. However, it is most controversial when combined with more traditional modes of photography and representation, specifically for the ways it is used to ‘enhance’ faces and bodies in line with mainstream beauty ideals of youth, slenderness and whiteness. Photoshop is not necessarily something ‘done’ to unwilling subjects of photography after the fact, rather it has become an integral part of the performance of public life, with celebrities such as Madonna and Lady Gaga employing Photoshop technicians as members of their image-making entourages along with makeup, hair and costume specialists.

Not only is there a general recognition that most commercial photographs have been photoshopped, there is also now an expectation that they have been digitally manipulated. Thus the position that photography once held as a ‘transparent’ medium with a closer link to reality than other visual technologies such as painting has come into question. Instead of placing photography outside of other visual arts and lauding its special connection to the real, the rise of Photoshop and digital photography have helped us to place it in the wider history of representation in which idealizing and enhancing are par for the course: ‘in the age of Photoshop, the alleged certainty of the photographic is subject to generalized suspicion’ (Hansen 2006: 228, also see Bull 2010: 21–2).

The nude philosopher

In January of 2008 the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur used a picture of Simone de Beauvoir on its cover to celebrate what would have been the philosopher’s hundredth birthday. This black and white photograph was taken by Art Shay in Chicago in 1952 (Shay was a friend of de Beauvoir’s lover, Nelson Algren). Shay describes it as a ‘furtive’ snapshot, and writes that de Beauvoir ‘playfully called me, “You naughty man” when she heard my Leica shutter click, but merely laughed when I shot a few more frames’ (2010). He says he neither sold nor exhibited the picture until after her death. The image shows de Beauvoir standing at a bathroom mirror putting her hair up. She has her back to the camera and wears nothing but high heels. If we compare Le Nouvel Observateur’s cover with Shay’s original, it is clear that Photoshop has been used. The lighting is brighter, thus eliminating uneven skin tones and shadows, especially in the bottom half of the picture. De Beauvoir’s buttocks, thighs and knees have been slimmed and smoothed.

There was controversy when the issue came out: various rival publications claimed it was a violation to publish a nude photo of an eminent philosopher, the feminist group Les Chiennes de Garde demanded in a protest outside the magazine’s offices that it put a nude photo of its (male) editor on the cover of the next issue, and many people commented that a nude photo of someone such as Jean-Paul Sartre would never have been used in such a way (see Lichfield 2008; Nadia 2008). Nathalie Petrowski wrote in La Presse (Montreal, Canada) ‘On the day when the Nouvel Obs has the nerve to show us the bare behind of a great male thinker, we will be able to say that equality between men and women has at last been achieved’ (quoted in Byrne 2008).

However, while there was much written about the supposed invasion of privacy and the gender inequality evident in the choice of image for the cover, very few people wrote critically about the Photoshop treatment that it had received. A couple of exceptions were Karen Moller’s 2008 Swans Commentary piece:

I felt insulted for her. Was it not enough to be admired worldwide as an intellectual? Did she have to be perfect physically as well? (The French do take national pride in their women and are personally offended if they aren’t considered beautiful.) Airbrushing or Photoshop-retouching seemed to take away a part of her special and very personal identity – a refusal to accept her as she was, one might say. I wonder what Simone de Beauvoir would have thought.

Parisian blogger Eliane characterized the dominant reactions like this: ‘How shameful it is to dig out this nude picture of a dignified writer and put it on first page, just to sell more copies!’ before offering her own reading of the scandal: ‘Then, of course, the original photo came out, which started a righter [sic] contest: the real indecency was to use Photoshop to model her figure according to modern taste’ (2008).

These two voices were in a very small minority and are the only critiques of Photoshop’s role in the affair that I have found in English. So why was there such a furore over the nudity while there was barely anything about the photoshopping? If we consider the context – the cover of a mainstream magazine – we realize that while the nudity was unusual and controversial the photoshopping was standard. So used are we to photoshopped images on the covers of magazines that we have learned to see un-photoshopped images as ‘wrong’; in this sense the image of de Beauvoir does look ‘better’ after it has been manipulated. What struck me when I first compared the two images was that in the original she somehow looks more nude, more exposed. We are so unused to seeing imperfections that when they do appear they make the subject seem more vulnerable, more revealed. Perhaps, because we are so accustomed to Photoshop’s effects now, it would be almost unseemly not to photoshop de Beauvoir for the mainstream press. In this way, Photoshop is a sort of clothing or mask – it is used to hide or cover certain individualizing features and thus works as a kind of uniform. Thus on this magazine cover de Beauvoir has been treated like a contemporary celebrity. Her image has been tweaked to fit the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Media Controversy and the Crisis of the Image
• Part I Controversy and Representation
• Part II Constructing Controversies
• Part III Ethics and Aesthetics in Controversial Media
• Part IV Engaging with Controversial Images
• Index