Concerned that girls and women feel excessive pressure to live up to the digitally Botoxed and liposuctioned images of human perfection they see in glossy magazines, lawmakers in Britain and France are trying to push advertisers to get real.
Under their proposals, ads containing altered photos of models would be required to carry disclaimers.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Unrealistic but very appealing idea of the week
Lawmakers in Britain and France want to make advertisers put warning labels on digitally altered photos in their ads. The French MP also wants warning labels on retouched editorial photos. Strikes me as unrealistic, but I like the idea anyway. Thoughts, anyone? Demon?
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7 comments:
It would be kind of funny. Imagine how the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue or Maxim would be. Each pic would have margins that reads : "Everything in this picture has been airbrushed, enhanced, surgically altered, cosmetically tattooed, chopped, cropped, and/or photoshopped for your viewing satisfaction." Or: "The following model has had the following done to her for this shoot: etc. etc."
All photographs are fiction. Even when printing photos chemically, you burn and dodge the image to bring focus to certain elements. Basic cropping is the unfairest of editorialization. The idea of putting warning labels on photos that meet a certain standard of digital alteration is naïve at best.
I agree that the sentiment is worthwhile, but I'd rather see the effort put into education, to teach children that all photographs are essentially illustrations, rather than enforcing a warning label.
Mrs. Chang and I were talking about this today as she removed unsightly hair from my head. We were discussing the notion that not only is it astounding that we as a civilization tolerate the great lie that is modeling/cinema/television, many people celebrate this lie culture. Not only do large groups of people obsess over what celebrities do to themselves physically to appear appealing to a certain percent of the populace, they encourage this behavior.
Education feels to me like putting a band-aid on a cerebral hemorrhage.
The lie is so ingrained already, Education could serve to alert people to the lie's presence, but as for countering it...
Pony: YOU are photoshopped. Discuss.
Wish whoever retouched me had actually used Photoshop, and not MacPaint.
let's take this one step farther: i'd like to see warnings attached to any special effects scene in a movie. every time a special effect happens, the movie would be interrupted by a somber man in a gray suit, sitting at a desk with the american flag off to one side. he would say: "pursuant to article 10, section 4 of the 2010 IMAGE bill, you are hereby warned that the scene you are about to witness is a modified representation of reality." then the film would resume. preferably, the man would be leslie nielsen, but i think he might be dead. john laroquette would suffice.
Of only slightly relevant but interestingly relevant interest
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