I think my background colors my opinion on this issue a fair amount. Personally, I see photography as just another form of representation, and just as I make choices about what lines to use and not use when drawing, I expect anyone who is so inclined and able to make photoshop choices, too.
In fact, I think it takes a fair amount of processing to make a photo "look like" a person as you see them. When I look at a person I almost always notice their eye-color. So in that earlier (camera-phone) picture for my website, I added color back to my eyes, that the camera can't capture. I would always color-alter an image to give a person a little more life in their face: in fact this process is so common, that most consumer-grade film is color-biased toward (caucasian) skin (in daylighting), and most digital cameras automatically enhance certain color ranges before you even see the image.
Even beyond that... I have no problem with pushing eyes to be a little larger, if that makes a person happy-- maybe in real life they have a lot of enegry and expressiveness in their eyes. Most people will draw eyes and mouths far "too large" because we actually "see" them as larger than they "are."
For that matter, it's said that the camera puts on 20 pounds. Traditionally Hollywood has dealt with this by keeping their actors and models at near starvation weight so that on screen they look as desired. I'm all for shifting that to post-processing, if they feel the need to do it anywhere, instead of altering the body from the beginning. Sure I'd rather they accept the body as it is, but if we don't have that, why make the model starve when 2 minutes in photoshop can acheive the same result?
So really, for me, I think an image, be it a drawing, a painting, a photograph, a collage, is a representation of the person, not the actual person, and all that I would take out of heavily processed images would be "Ah, so this is these people see (or want to see) themselves. Interesting." Now if I perceive a huge self-image-dysphoria that would most likely make me extremly uninterested in the person, but mostly because I prefer people who can live in their own skin, not because I prefer people who happen to be captured well by photography as a contemporary camera functions.
As I said, I know all of this is colored by my background. I've spent most of my life making images that I think better represent what I see and perceive than an image I can take with a camera.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-03-06 03:45 pm (UTC)In fact, I think it takes a fair amount of processing to make a photo "look like" a person as you see them. When I look at a person I almost always notice their eye-color. So in that earlier (camera-phone) picture for my website, I added color back to my eyes, that the camera can't capture. I would always color-alter an image to give a person a little more life in their face: in fact this process is so common, that most consumer-grade film is color-biased toward (caucasian) skin (in daylighting), and most digital cameras automatically enhance certain color ranges before you even see the image.
Even beyond that... I have no problem with pushing eyes to be a little larger, if that makes a person happy-- maybe in real life they have a lot of enegry and expressiveness in their eyes. Most people will draw eyes and mouths far "too large" because we actually "see" them as larger than they "are."
For that matter, it's said that the camera puts on 20 pounds. Traditionally Hollywood has dealt with this by keeping their actors and models at near starvation weight so that on screen they look as desired. I'm all for shifting that to post-processing, if they feel the need to do it anywhere, instead of altering the body from the beginning. Sure I'd rather they accept the body as it is, but if we don't have that, why make the model starve when 2 minutes in photoshop can acheive the same result?
So really, for me, I think an image, be it a drawing, a painting, a photograph, a collage, is a representation of the person, not the actual person, and all that I would take out of heavily processed images would be "Ah, so this is these people see (or want to see) themselves. Interesting." Now if I perceive a huge self-image-dysphoria that would most likely make me extremly uninterested in the person, but mostly because I prefer people who can live in their own skin, not because I prefer people who happen to be captured well by photography as a contemporary camera functions.
As I said, I know all of this is colored by my background. I've spent most of my life making images that I think better represent what I see and perceive than an image I can take with a camera.