meLOVE: wth?

So, I've been surfing photography blogs again. Always a bad thing. But it begs to be said, again and again and again and again - why the heck do photographers make people look like plastic? Really - I promise you I've been a photographer for long enough that I can assure you a) newborns do not look like baby dolls, b) every man, woman and child on the planet has pores and c) if your child's hair and eyes (or the grass they are seated in) were seriously as "sharp" as that, they'd make themselves bleed, daily.

Now, I'm not going to name names. That would be rude, especially since, at the heart of things, there are a lot of great pictures by very talented people... that have just been photoshopped, in my opinion, to death. While I see the validity of taking out the occasional zit I just can't figure out the rest of it.

Why is this coming up again? Well, here's the skinny. There are a few photogs that I've been stalking for a while - ones whose work I've previously enjoyed, ones who I was rooting for... and there are TWO of them who have gone to the Dark Side with the photoshoppy-ness. Two! (One in Sweden and one in Utah - relax unless you happen to be a photographer in one of those places lol) The photogs must have bought some skin smoothing software and discovered the lasso/unsharp mask in Photoshop because all their pictures in the last several weeks are of kids whose faces look like potato dumplings with glass marbles for eyes and razor-wire for hair. Yikes. I've seen clients of mine (I often suggest they make use of other photographers so all their pictures don't look the same) on other sites that the photogs are big into Photoshopping, too, and it catches me off guard since I know what they look like 'in the raw' so to speak.

Anyhoo. For anyone who isn't sure what I'm talking about, I'll give you the rough Photoshop directions for creating picture perfect people pictures. First you zap the zits and get rid of a few wrinkles or blemishes or veins or whatever so the skin-tone is unnaturally even. You select all the skin (except maybe a little around the eyes so it looks 'real') and apply a blur. Once the blur is applied and all pores or remnant of human flesh-like looking stuff are effectively erased, the photoshopper goes back in and adds a texture that gives the 'effect' of millions of tiny, perfectly spaced, monochromatic pores. Then they go in and select the teeth and sometimes the eyes and get rid of any yellowing or blood vessels that give the subject the appearance of being human. Once that's all done, they throw in some extra eyelashes or remove stray eyebrow hairs, select the irises (the coloured part of the eyeball) and lighten them up, add some contrast, adjust the hue and saturation, add in a catch-light or two, then sharpen the edges so it looks like... a glass marble... then they airbrush colour or sometimes adjust make-up and sharpen the sh*t out of the entire picture so that each individual hair looks like it's spun sugar, each leaf or blade of grass appears to be cut from crystal, and facial features seem to have been etched from the subject's face with laser-precision.

I have friends who love being photoshopped. The wrinkles, the pores, the yellow teeth, scars... They get years shaved off their appearance and have virtually zero "flaws" by the time all is said and done. Then they get surprised and often offended when people meet them in real life and say, "Wow - are you stressed? Tired? Overdue for another facelift?" Now, it's one thing to do a glamour session - that's kind of the point is of getting glammed up - and doing a fantasy picture with faerie wings and whatnot, sure, whatever - but a family portrait? May as well start signing your kids up for pageants. ~shudders~

On the off-chance you are one of the photographers who does this, or one of the clients who seeks this in a photographer, I apologize - I intend no offense. I only speak of it because I think our culture beats into us often enough that we aren't perfect. We have pores, we have blood vessels in the whites of our eyes, our teeth are actually shades of off-white and yellow... and although from an aesthetic perspective the retouched images certainly are pretty to look at, imagine being that child, and imagine as she grows up looking at that picture-perfect her, the one she can never quite accomplish. What does that do to a little boy's ego, his self-esteem, to believe that in the end he isn't good enough the way he is and needs to become something else?

The 'flaws' the photoshopper types remove are the flaws that make us unique and human. They are the sum of the pieces parts that make us up - the mounds of flesh, perfect and imperfect in their finishes, the bits of muscle under the skin, the bones that frame us up whether long or short - and I cannot understand why there are so many photographers successfully making a living out of turning our sons and daughters into superficially perfected beings they can't even live up to. By the time girls are 7 or 8 they are paying attention to the way they look, and boys aren't far behind. I have this nightmare vision of these parents with these pictures of their perfected children adorning their walls so that every day the child can look at themselves in the picture, then in the mirror, and hate their own reflection.