Spot removal. Frequency separation. Gaussian blur. So many tools, so many imperfections to remove. Transforming slightly or substantially the person’s face at the photographer’s discretion, yielding a person both like and unlike the one photographed. This, the photograph tells us implicitly, is the person. This is what they look like—or rather how we would prefer they looked like.
In the previous year, I learned through multiple classes how to light faces and digitally edit skin to portray a more ideal beauty. It was even presented to me what ideal beauty was in terms of people’s responses to facial shapes according to a study. One discussion even centered on how to make a person with wrinkled skin look younger, with softer skin. However, emphasis was made to not make the person look “too young.”
In all of these lectures, demonstrations, and critiques there was only technical consideration of how to make a person’s appearance more ideal. Often that discussion centered on appealing to the desires or satisfaction of the client whether that were a company running an ad campaign or an individual getting a personal portrait. The discussions were always about the how. Never was there a discussion of should.
It is this implicit dismissal of the ethical consideration of photographic manipulation and its social consequences that made me feel then, and to some degree now, that I may not want to be a part of this profession. There is a manifest problem with how people value themselves and their bodies that is linked to what they see in mass media. Yet what was the excuse I heard in class from one of my instructors for continuing these practices? Oh, it was that the media and the public dictated beauty standards, that we just had to go along, and that the media and the public needed to change the situation. I am surprised how they never saw the irony. We, the photographers, are the media. We are part of the machine that creates the problem.
With this heavy on my mind, a growing resentment of this profession began to burn in my belly for what we implicitly tell people is desirable or even worthy of being seen, particularly toward women, people of color, older people, and those with physical differences. To see how no one, from instructors to students, were addressing their responsibility to the perpetuation of narrow and often unrealistic beauty standards was troubling. I reached a point where I resented my new profession, not sure if I wanted to complete school or to be a part of this industry that, in my view, was eager to disavow any responsibility for the social consequences of its work.
It is why I still have reservations about certain uses of digital editing or the selective photographing of those considered beautiful and the exclusion of those considered not. Perhaps this means I cannot be a commercial photographer or fashion photographer—even though I would love to further explore fashion because of the emotion it expresses as style. But I just cannot get past what feels to me to be the implicit and, to some degree, intentional deception that is the projection of the ideal self in ideal beauty nor the denial of our critical role in its perpetuation.