PRESENT TENSE:THE NEW YORKER magazine has just run a fascinating profile of Pascal Dangin, the fashion and publishing worlds' most sought-after retoucher of photographs, writes Shane Hegarty.
In the March issue of Vogue alone, he "tweaked" 144 images: 107 ads, 36 fashion pictures and the cover. From his desk, he splices skyscapes, changes the colour of the sky, makes the grass more grassy and gives actresses digital boob jobs, knee lifts and neck transplants.
"Maybe we could redo the ass," a photographer suggests. "Yes, the ass is quite heavy," Dangin replies.
The article is entertaining, if high-pitched and breathless ("Dangin salvaged a recent project at W by making a minute adjustment to the angle of a shoulder blade.") But what makes it particularly noteworthy is that it marks the moment when the person with the airbrush can be hailed as an artist in his own right, whose "digital brushstrokes can be as deliberate as Jasper Johns' or John Currin's are on canvas". It is an acknowledgement of a manipulator who has gone beyond merely interpreting photographers' work and now imposes his aesthetic on it.
"It's immaculate, and there's a kind of richness to the pixellation," says one art expert. "It feels like you could almost sink your finger into it."
Or, as the photographer Annie Leibovitz puts it: "Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you're good. If he works with you a lot, maybe you think, 'well, maybe I'm worthwhile'."
So, if even one of the world's foremost portrait photographers is gushing like a smashed ink pot, we have reached the point where we can not only acknowledge the prevalence of image manipulation, but actually revel in it. This is no longer an activity to be carried out by unmentionables, hidden in their basement offices, with their Photoshop and preternatural eye for a blemish.
Perhaps that's how it should be. All fashion, clearly, is based on artifice anyway. As is advertising. What you see is not what you get.
And in the publishing world, images have increasingly been subjected to the same process as words. You think that every one of your favourite writers files beautiful, perfect copy? Stop any sub-editor for a major publication and they will all have tales of this columnist or that reporter, who has a habit of filing raw text that reads as if its been constructed by tipping over a tin of Alphabetti Spaghetti. But such quirks and grammatical catastrophes are corrected and covered up by unsung and uncredited sub-editors.
The process by which photographs are shot, manipulated and published is only catching up in this regard. It ranges from the removal of dust or minor blemishes, simply to clean up the image, all the way up to heavily altered shoots, such as a recent Sopranos tableau vivant for Vanity Fair, which was shot by Leibovitz and then comprehensively stylised by Dangin. The profile gives us an indication not of how much is altered, but of how little of what you see in the media is raw. That's to be expected in the world of the glossies, reliant as they are on the visual bombast offered by celebrity, fashion and advertising. But because much of the print media is now reliant on this trio, a lot of what you are presented with is, in essence, false.
We are past the time, though, when the magic of Photoshop is a secret known only to a magic circle of retouchers. Anyone with a digital camera is familiar with the process of sharpening images, of cropping, of eliminating red-eye from birthday-party snaps. Technology has eliminated the need for naturalism to be anything other than artificially enhanced.
The problem is that, as it becomes the norm, the raw, untouched photographs that still, largely, survive on the news pages are arguably under threat.
History is already littered with examples of altered images that often raised interesting questions. A Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a woman kneeling over a corpse after the shootings at Kent State University in 1970 was altered to remove an unsightly fence-post. Did this invalidate the power of the photograph? No. Newsweek put Martha Stewart's head on another woman's body for a 2005 cover. Deception? Obviously. But all in photographic manipulation is not black and white.
Many newspapers do have house rules in relation to such manipulation, and there have been a couple of recent examples in which news photographers tinkered with images to create pictures more powerful than the ones they had actually taken. They were caught, and the subsequent apologies and firings served as a warning that a great news photograph relies not only on the power of its composition, but on its honesty. Can it hold on to that in an era when manipulation is not only the norm, but hailed as an art form? Because the news photograph is in danger of becoming a diminishing island in the middle of a digitally enhanced sea.
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