Journalism or Art. Retouched Photos.....

I am starting a new section of my newsletter. A pseudo “letter to the editor”. A forum for me to pontificate or educate or simply sound off! I will post an intro on my newsletter, and then the entire letter here. This month I would like to address a program that was aired by CNN’S Christiane Amanpour examining the proposed French law which would required any retouched photo to be labeled as such. The conversation that followed was between Ms. Amanpour, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg and Joe Zee of Elle Magazine. The premise made is that by not labeling photos as either true to life or retouched, the media is furthering the ideal of an unattainable perfection thereby fostering eating disorders and low self esteem among young people. There were all of the standard arguments: using incredibly thin models makes ‘real’ women feel ugly and makes them strive for an “unattainable” ideal, people don’t understand that photos are retouched therefore we are sending out a bad message that all women should look like these pictures, that images of this kind cause eating disorders. On the face of it, such a law sounds admirable and noble and I should applaud such an effort to control the rampant superficiality of the fashion media.

In contrast, I thought that many important points were left out of the conversation, which made me angry on many levels. First, let me state that I feel I have standing to write on this issue from many sides. I am in front of the camera and on-stage. I come from the world of ballet, which has, if possible, ideals even more “unattainable” than those of fashion, and I have spent many (most of my) years fighting disordered eating and messed up body image, a struggle which actually began long before I understood what the ideals in my chosen industries are. I also teach and know that I have a deep personal responsibility and commitment to keeping things real and honest with and for my students.

I do not support the hiring of underage or ACTUALLY ill models. I do not support the use of drugs, diuretics, insane diets or emotional abuse to bring people into line with the aesthetics of the industry. I DO support the work currently being done to increase the acceptance of all body types in both fashion and Hollywood and wish that such change would come about faster. What I do not accept is the premise that models are not real people. Being tall and thin does not automatically make you anorexic, a term that is thrown around with little knowledge. There are absolutely girls and women in the industry who are suffering terribly. Designers who promote this by hiring sick and malnourished girls should not do so. Sample sizes should not be 00. However, anorexia and other related eating disorders have many causes and placing the blame on the media is easy but does nothing to address the much deeper issues that most of these people (for eating disorders do not only affect the female half of the population) deal with on a daily basis. When discussing fashion, Hollywood, and the media in general, we like to throw around the term “real women” a lot. Models and actors actually are human beings. They are neither robots nor do they arrive from a different planet. Do I think that there should be room for more than one standard of beauty in the industry? Absolutely, but obesity is a much much greater problem in American society than anorexia, yet this entire discussion seems to leave that half of the equation out in the cold completely.

Now, onto my specific problem with the proposed law. There is a huge difference between Fashion photography and news photography. Fashion is, beyond it’s place in the business world, an art form. Fashion photography is about making beautiful, in the eye of the artist, pictures. It has no claim on being “real”. There is a real and powerful business behind the clothes and accessories, the make-up and perfume and creative geniuses who decide what shade of blue is in vogue each season. But, beyond that is ART. Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes hideous but always it is someone’s vision of an idealized scene. To propose that that artistic vision be slapped with a warning label about retouching is a knee jerk reaction to an incredibly complex problem. We don’t require painters to include a caveat saying that the image created with their oil is not realistic.

There is a distinction that I would like to make here, one between fashion photography and journalism. There are grey areas. Are actors who are posing for fashion as themselves models or personalities who should be represented realistically? Should journalists be represented flaws and all. For all of Ms. Amanpour’s questions about retouching, her own portrait on her CNN and Facebook pages appears to have had significant retouching.

People need to take personal responsibility. You can slap as many warning labels on things as you want but people are going to believe what they want to. We know that smoking is bad for you, that eating junk food makes you obese, that not everyone can look like a model. Cindy Crawford famously stated once that even she doesn’t look like “Cindy Crawford, supermodel” when she is at home. Fashion photography is an art form, like painting or making movies or recording a song. We manipulate it to tell a story. This discussion should be taking place not in regards to an art form but in regards to news and what should be trusted as fact. Fashion is not that arena. The proposed law is simply a bright band-aid placed on the wrong injury, not an actual part of the cure.