Maybe she's born with it... maybe it's Photoshop: image manipulation and the simulation of women

by Sandra Gavard

Culture of Simulation
Professor Charles Levin
McGill University
Winter 1997

"All photographs are suspect these days. Because now, with digital systems, they can be changed perfectly. Perfectly."  — From Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton

When Michelle Pfeiffer appeared on the cover of Esquire in 1990 in a low cut red dress, the caption beside the photo read "What Michelle Pfeiffer Needs . . . Is Absolutely Nothing." Yet, the magazine's editors must have forgotten to specify something to their readers. Adbusters Quarterly revealed the manipulation and claimed that what Pfeiffer actually needed was $1,525 in touch-ups. That's what Diane Scott Associates, Inc. charged Esquire for the following work, described in a purchase order obtained and reprinted by Adbusters "Clean up complexion, soften eye lines, soften smile line, add color to lips, trim chin, remove neck lines, soften line under ear lobe . . . remove stray hair . . . adjust color and add hair on top of head . . . add dress on side to create better line . . ." [1]

The progress made in the field of computer-manipulated images has created a new world of representation or as Jean Baudrillard would refer to it, a world of simulation. Baudrillard's essays on simulation portray the world in which we live as one whose power structures have become radically altered. Marshall McLuhan, in The Medium is the Massage, may have anticipated some of what Baudrillard is saying in terms of the confusion of the real and the simulation of the real, but Baudrillard takes this even as far as to say that the real no longer exists.

This paper seeks to demonstrate that women's magazines, with their use of digital imaging, simulate an image of womanliness in a way defined by Baudrillard as the second order of simulacra, that is to say that "it masks and denatures a profound reality."[2]

This paper will contribute in the opening up of some the arguments and discussions using the pertinence of Baudrillard's three orders of simulation. Its purpose will be to define first what digital imaging is, and provide a brief history of image manipulation. It will then investigate not only the way in which the computer-technology is used to remodel women's pictures in the media, but also the way women see this dictation of their image and what is at stake. I shall, through the course of this paper draw illustrations primarily from women's magazines supplementing them with data collected on the Web and from popular culture to its largest context. It is not my intent to discuss the theories of image and photography or extensively comment on those issues (for a detailed analysis if these issues I direct the reader to Ron Burnett's Cultures of Vision [3]) nor it is to discuss the legal and ethical implications of digital imaging (for discussion on those matters see for example Stacey Carpenter's essay published online.) [4])

An Introduction to the History of Image Manipulation

Ever since the invention of photography, manipulation has occurred. However, manipulation has never been easier, faster, more accessible and more difficult to detect than today. Changes can be blended so convincingly, that even experts have a difficult time deciding what is real and what has been changed. We are in the midst of a big confusion and "digital imaging" (also referred to as electronic imaging, computer imaging, image processing or image design) is at the root of this confusion. Digital imaging allows just about anyone with a computer, a scanner or a digital camera, basic software, and a little training to manipulate photographs, making the imagined, real.

How may this technology create problems and what are the implications? The first aspect to consider is how the technology got this far.

The ability and the practice of manipulating and altering photographic images is probably as old as the camera itself as suggested by John Henshall, author of the article "Beware False Reality"

"The camera has always been a liar, especially in the hands of a capable photographer. The choice of a wide angle lens exaggerates perspective and consequently affects perception of the relative sizes of objects in the frame. A long focal length lens makes objects appear closer together than they are. A wide aperture reduces depth of field to the point where attention can be directed to the in-focus part of the image. A low camera angle accentuates the stature of subjects, allowing them to dominate us; a high camera angle enables us to dominate the subject. The precise moment of exposure and shutter speed record just a fraction of a second of action, submitting it as a representation of an event which may have taken much longer. Dodging and burning redirects emphasis. Cropping - in the viewfinder, on the enlarger table, or for the pages of a publication - edits what we see and further influences our awareness of truth.."[5]

Image manipulation is not new to photography. As early as 1861, a political scandal resulted from a composite photograph placing the head of the Queen of Naples on another woman's nude body. Ever since the invention of the daguerreotype, manipulation has occurred in the form of cropping, airbrushing, even pasting other images onto a photograph and then reshooting that picture, making the new image look like an original. Traditionally, photographs were manipulated by hand, a painstaking process of scraping and painting the negative.

These old manners of photographic manipulation have even been used in the past to "erase" someone from history. That is, for instance what the Soviet Union did with Stalin's rival Leon Trotsky who vanished from historical photography in the famous shot of Vladimir Stalin's May 1920 address to a crowd. The same technique was used with Grigory Nelyubov, one of the nation's earliest cosmonaut trainees, who had his face smudged and cropped out, and was completely erased from all space shots and group shots in 1961, after he had a run-in with police. Twenty years later, when the Soviet Union wanted to downplay the military's role in the Soviet space program, they eliminated Soviet missile chief Kirill S. Moskalenko, who, in military attire, originally appeared in a photo between cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and rocket expert Sergei Korolev during their first launch of man into space. [6]

These early special effects of retouching look rather crude by today's standards. People are now visually more sophisticated and are less inclined to accept the photographic "evidence."

Qualitative changes in the manipulation of photographic imagery occurred when computers were introduced in the early 1960's. By the 1970's a small market had developed for computer-generated imagery despite the fact that the equipment that was slow, astronomically expensive and available only to a few. By the 1980's the amount of computer-imagery grew tremendously as did the availability of good equipment at somewhat less than exorbitant price. [7]

Now, at the end of 1990's, thanks to computer and imaging software; the technology has advanced to the point where a photo collage can be stitched together seamlessly.

Photographs are today manipulated using computer technology. It is a quick and cheap process, and the results can be striking. The manipulation of digital images is made possible by first turning photographs into a format which a computer can read; which means that a picture has to be turned into 1's and 0's before it can be handled. This is achieved by scanning the photograph into the computer or by using a digital camera [8]. Methods such as airbrushing, are used to disguise any physical 'flaws', and for decades have been used by skilled professionals in areas such as advertising. The manipulation of reality is no longer in the hands of those few skilled retouchers. Popular easy-to-use imaging programs such as Adobe Photoshop have made manipulation easy, fast and accessible to everyone. To the untrained eye, the manipulation is difficult to detect and anyone can revise and create their own version of reality. The basic software of Photoshop was developed as Barneyscan XP in the late 1980's by Thomas and John Knoll for use with a scanner. Adobe bought the rights to the software from the Knolls and introduced Photoshop 1.0 in 1990 [9]. Constantly improved with new features, the last version, Photoshop 4.0, was introduced in November 1997 and includes "adjustment layers" which allow the user to work with more than one version of an image.

Video scanners and digital cameras turn a photograph into an arrangement of electronic digits, or pixels, which are then stored in the computer's memory. With Adobe Photoshop you can open a scanned image, zoom in an out of sections of it, and move pixels about as you wish. You can even "clone" a section of the photograph, and repeatedly reproduce those pixels until you get the same color and characteristics of the original. Changes can be blended so convincingly, that it has became increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what has been modified.

As postmodern critics would assert, the development of digital technology facilitates, accelerates, and effects the kinds of dispersals assuring the plenitude of copies.

Image Manipulation and the successive phases of the image

Today, almost every photo on the cover of almost every magazine has been retouched using computer technology. In fact, it could be argued that in a sense our whole society has become a 'cover'. The new magicians of the virtual era multiply the ways to manipulate our perception of reality. As images become increasingly 'immaterial', the consequences on our day to day lives are definitely material. The digital technology is modifying what we see in the media and edited reality is everywhere on billboards, in glossy magazines, tabloid newspapers and advertisements. Life is becoming an impossibly perfect model almost always digitally retouched, smoothed out and airbrushed.

Before examining the issues involved in the use of image manipulation, I would like to provide the reader with some examples that have surfaced within the print media; examples of photographs that have been "fixed" to make their composition or even content perfect.

Perhaps the most notorious example of image manipulation was exhibited in National Geographic's February 1982 cover, where one of Egypt's great pyramids was electronically moved closer together to improve the composition by bringing its apex inside the magazine's yellow cover frame [10]. Former editor Wilbur Garrett argued the decision in a New York Times letter to the editor to point out that the effect would have been the same if the photographer had moved over a couple of feet. However, the practice was perceived as deceptive by many readers of the respected magazine.

Police mugshot of O.J. Simpson taken June 17, 1994 and cover of Time magazine, June 27, 1994.

Another famous "fixed" photograph was that of Time's 1994 cover photo depicting a severely darkened O.J. Simpson [11]. The week after Time ran the incriminating cover "photo," the managing editor apologized for confusing his audience

"If there was anything wrong with the cover, in my view, it was that it was not immediately apparent that this was a photo-illustration rather than an unaltered photograph; to know that, a reader had to turn to our contents page or see the original mug shot on the opening page of the story." [12]

Although the editors claim that there is a clear difference between a photograph and a photo-illustration, it is apparently still doubtful that the difference is that obvious for the lay public.

Another infamous photo which illustrated this difference was New York Newsday' s photo of skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan practicing together a situation that could not have ever happened at the time the picture was published since the practice started on the day the image was published. The photo was created and composed using electronic imagery.

However and more importantly, digital-imaging technology can even create an artificial woman, as was done on the cover of Mirabella for their September 1994 issue which featured as a cover model "an extraordinary image of great American beauty" [13] with a caption that read "Who is the Face of America?" The contents page of the magazines gave the following clues, regarding the identity of the cover girl:

"We asked the distinguished photographer Hiro to come up with a cover personifying today's all-American beauty. We thought it should be someone who represents the diversity of this country. We know that Hiro called in models - not famous faces, but beautiful faces, of all ethnicities. And, after an extensive search and painstaking work, he did present us with an extraordinary image of great American beauty. But who is she? Hiro's not telling. He will say only that she has never been photographed before and that she's not with any modeling agency. And, she's impossible to reach. He hints that she's something of a split personality. And he says, with a smile, that it wasn't easy getting her together. Maybe her identity has something to do with the microchip floating through space, next to that gorgeous face. America is a melting pot. And true American beauty is a combination of elements from all over the world. Is our cover model representative of the melting pot? All we're sure of is that her looks could melt just about anything." [14]

It is no surprise that the cover-girl was "impossible to reach," and that she was not easy to get together since the Mirabella cover was in fact a composite picture that was created by combining six pictures of six different women. Steve Kane of Chrome Art in NYC was responsible for the computer manipulation and confirmed that there is not an image on a magazine cover (and often all through the magazine) that has not in some way been retouched using a computer.

The Mirabella cover is similar in 'nature' to Time magazine's special issue in the Fall of 1993, "The New Face of America How immigrants Are Shaping the World's First Multicultural Society." The cover featured the picture of a young woman and the side bar read, "Take a good look at this woman. She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of... The New Face of America."[15] The cover girl, Eve, was produced from seven women and seven men of various ethnic and racial backgrounds using Morph 2.0, a professional, easy-to-use morphing software.

Scientific American declared that digital technology had subverted the certainty of photograph as evidence and to prove their point, they offered on their February 1994 cover a photo of Abraham Lincoln, arm-in-arm with Marilyn Monroe. Inside, they demonstrated how using an off-the-shelf Macintosh with easily available software, they were able to bring together the president (who died in 1865) with the film star (who died in 1962).

Once we have something in a computer, we gain unprecedented control over it. We can change, distort, or rearrange a photograph without damaging the original. This control has interesting consequences in a Baudrillardian perspectives. For the author of Simulacra and Simulation the successive phases of the image are:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever it is its own pure simulacrum. [16]

The examples from the National Geographic and from Time clearly "mask and denature a profound reality," and the New York Newsday and Scientific American illustrations "mask the absence of a profound reality." Indeed, in both cases what was pictured had simply never occurred. The Mirabella case is a perfect example of an image that "has no relation to any reality whatsoever." Reality has been dismissed to the profit of perfect images or edited reality.

Supermodels, perhaps one of the most cogent examples, can be considered in the same way that Baudrillard considers Disneyland the idyllic woman featured in magazines does not exist. Not outside of Vogue or Glamour. "Even I don't look like Cindy Crawford when I wake up in the morning," admitted the famous supermodel [17]. A simulacra has been created, something without its own reality, a signifier without a corresponding signified, against which we judge ourselves and our own positions.

This is a relatively simple simulation. But, as Baudrillard tells us, such simulations have permeated our society, which cannot itself be defined except by way of various simulacra. The social and aesthetic categories into which we are placed and into which we place each other, and the implicit moralities and rules by which we operate are all based on concepts which have no real basis and are devoid of concrete referentials.

Image manipulation in women's magazine creating the ideological body

Based on the imagery of movie stills and fashion shots, the image of woman as it is seen in popular culture imposes a stereotyped image of an ideological body. Each pose confronts the viewer with banal forms of subjectivity utterly familiar from a mass culture in which not only dress and gesture, but personality itself is constructed out of a social nexus of commodified images and ideal types. There is, of course, something grotesque about these images. The subjects are dominated by subtle and not-so-subtle forms of social and cultural discipline which erase any trace of reality. The image of the individual is literally exploded and simulated. I believe that those images suggest that they may always be in part the portrait of a cultural type, the image of a subject whose reality has been objectified by social forces.Identity here is indeed caught in a kind of simulacrum, so that Barthes's lament that no one in a photograph "is ever anything but a copy of a copy" becomes a kind of gloss on every image presented by the media.

If the construction of one's personality is something that has been done and redone in the Hollywood star system for example, the created images of stars projected by the media has given a simulated image of what a woman should look like [18]. In spite of all the things that separate stars from supermodels, such as the fact that models' only work is to "just be beautiful," these are two idealistic figures of feminity which have in common the fact that their beauty is the product of an extraordinary work of metamorphosis. Of course, women have always used tricks to enhance their appearances, yet if this used to be part of individual skill and taste, it seems that in our contemporary universe of image and media this is part of the work of professionals of appearance. The star-system has instigated and capitalized on the reign of the "manufactured" beauty, created by specialists of seduction (make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists, etc). Supermodels are the continuation of this artificial superproduction. Models are, just as movie stars, neither unreal nor fictious they are recomposed and surreal.

Picture editors and art directors casually manipulate skin tone, eradicate wrinkles and blemishes, change eye color, scrape off excesses fat, and erase even basically human characteristics such as pores or bags under the eyes. Today, after a photo shoot, fashion photographers often retire to their computers and rearrange their pictures. Faces can become wrinkle free, hair more lustrous, irises more brilliant, eye whites whiter. Eyes may move, ears may shrink, mouths may widen, and necks and legs may lengthen. Models might find that they have miraculously lost weight in various places... and gained it in others. Electronic surgery is far cheaper, quicker, and less painful than the real thing.

What is ironic, but not surprising, is that photos of men are far less likely to get major retouching as compared to images of women. Wrinkles and stubble are often considered to add character to a man's face...but that is not the same for the opposite sex. [19]

The changes are usually subtle, but the overall effect can be to create almost a new person. By plugging in mathematics computations, for instance, a nonexistent image can be generated on the computer. Kyoko Date "the first virtual idol," but also a virtual representation of woman, is an interesting example when it comes to nonexistent images generated on the computer. Probably one of the most sophisticated facsimiles of one ever created by a computer, Kyoko Date, also known as DK-96, was designed by the Visual Science Laboratory (VSL), one of Japan's premiere computer software companies for a talent agency which promotes her the same way they promote human celebrities. Using the latest computer technologies, computer-graphics and motion capture to create her facial expression, VSL created an ideal face for their virtual idol.
"In the beginning we imitated actual celebrities' features. Then we changed direction and decided to fashion a completely imaginary look. We just pored over photo albums of idols as a reference for understanding what constituted so-called beauty," said the project team. The case of Kyoko Date, the virtual pop-star, is interesting in the sense that nowadays some of the latest pop music stars never appear on TV or on stage. Kyoko Date's creators even argue that, "in fact pop stars may not really even need to exist as long as their music is good." This is greatly debatable and one can wonder why their creation is a reflection of beauty standards if look does not matter. However, what is even more striking is that Kyoko Date has been created for economic reasons creating a virtual celebrity turns out to be cheaper than "creating" a "real" one. [20]

Electronic imaging has emphasized the simulation to the simulacra. The fact that someone's representation exists is no longer absolute proof that the image behind it exists. It may have been electronically manipulated, or even computer generated, and no original may have ever even existed as it is the case with Kyoko Date.

Mass media came up with the ideological body as it became easy through editing to construct a new reality. The ideological body represents a desired reality. This constructed reality poses an ideology on the audience. The norm of the ideological body lies outside itself, by manipulating reality it creates something that is not natural for the body itself.

Twenty five years of research on the effects of TV has concluded that the more television we watch the more we perceive the real world to be like that of television. It takes no great leap of imagination to correlate that study to the effects of other media messages. The more media images we take in the more we believe them to be the norm. Deconstructing media images is about reclaiming what is true for us and discerning what is fiction. [21]

The Triumph of the Society of Consumption

In its April 1998 issue, Glamour magazine published a letter by a concerned reader regarding the fact that the "plus size" models that were shown in the "Fashion-that-fits" page were about a size 14, or the size of the average American woman. In response, the fashion editor in charge offered a pretty straightforward explanation. She called this trend a "fashion reality" "Glamour's size 14 models are 'plus' not in relation to real women, but in relation to the the 'average-size' models, who are size 6 or 8." [22]

Super models, generally not regarded as "real people," have continued to get thinner and thinner in all the popular magazines. Modeling agencies have been reported to actively pursue anorexic models. The average American woman is 5'4" [23] whereas the average female model is 5'9 and maintains a weight about 15 to 20 percent below what is considered healthy for her age and height [24] Some models go through plastic surgery, some are "taped-up" to mold their bodies into more photogenic representations of themselves, and their photos are then airbrushed before going to print. By far, these body types and images are not the norm and unobtainable to the average individual, they are rather, in Plato's words and as stated in Charles Levin's Jean Baudrillard, A Study in Cultural Metaphysics, a "destabilizing corruption of the norm." The constant force of these images on society makes women believe what they should be. [25]

These images of women that are found in magazines and in films act as templates guiding women in sculpting themselves into the self they want to become. Many women's try, at least partially, to emulate tough characters portrayed by Pamela Anderson, Sigourney Weaver, Jane Fonda, or Madonna. By focusing on the personalities portrayed in those stories, they can home in their desired self without having to deduce the requisite behavior from abstract rules. An image of their intended result is more effective at promoting change than is an abstract set of prescriptions. In times of intellectual opposition and isolation, for instance, recalling an image of Jane Fonda exercising will stiffen their resolve and independence more than advising themselves to "be fit and healthy!"

In Baudrillard's words "Just as violence, seduction and narcissism are relayed in advance by models, industrially produced by the mass media and made of 'repérables' signs (so that every woman can take herself for Brigitte Bardot, it has to be hair, or mouth, or such clothes feature that distinguish them, it is to say necessarily the same thing for all of them.) Everyone finds one's own personality in the achievement of those models." [26]

The market of the products supposed to help in attaining the ideological body is massive and unending, and it does not take much of an entrepreneur to see where millions of American women are spending billions of dollars. Today the diet industry in the United States generates a stagerring $33 billion in revenue; a threefold increase in less than three decades [27] and the market for plastic surgery had become a $5-billion-a-year industry and is increasingly considered part of the natural order of things for women. Plastic surgery is becoming the "real life" equivalent of the Photoshop surgery. Living in a society obsessed by images, images that promote thinness and ideal beauty (if such a thing exists), women try to resemble those images by virtually all means necessary and through operations such as augmentation mammoplasty (breast enlargement), mastopexy (breast lift), abdominoplasty (tummy tuck), liposuction , rhinoplasty (nose job), facelifts, browlifts, blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery), etc... [28] The consumer feels constantly defined as inadequate against the ideal unattainable female object of beauty. Women are trained to feel that their 2000 body parts fail in comparison to computer generated cover models and that they can only fill this void in their buying of products that compensate for not being "born with it." Pressure is emphasized with studies such as the one conducted by economists by Daniel Hamermersh and Jeff Biddle who concluded in their 1993 research that attractive people make more money. [29]

However, most women complain of feeling pressured by society to watch their weight and to look as beautiful as possible. Their anger and their exhaustion with the bombardment of constructed images can be perceived in the following messages posted on the web site "Bring the Noise - Are images of women on TV, in magazines, and in movies damaging to your self-esteem and health?" [30]

No matter what is said the media perpetrates the image that thin is better [...] Let's see the woman who is 5'3" and weighs 160lbs. There is nothing wrong with slim and thin but let's see the real American woman.

[...] I stopped watching TV over 7 months ago, because I just couldn't stomach the likes of Baywatch, Melrose Place, etc.. that paint an unrealistic picture of life, the world and people in general. I refuse to read Vogue, Cosmo, etc... I cannot and will not give into the societal pressure to look perfect, dress to follow the trends, to be like everyone else.[...] It has to stop.

Even though the women portrayed in the media as the 'beautiful ones' are fake, (due to todays technology) it makes the average woman feel like they are worthless because they do not meet the expectations created.[...]

In the media, all we see is the end result, never the exercise and the diet (healthy or unhealthy) that produces the body. The media image celebrates perfection with airbrushes and lighting and camera angles. All women have imperfections, but the print and video campaigns have "toys" that disguise the realness of the model.

Revel in your imperfections, it's what makes you real.

[...] You have to understand that T.V. is not real life[...]

Who set the "perfect body"??? In this desperate generation of ours we think of the "perfect body" as something seen on Baywatch. Long time ago the woman's natural body was considered "perfect" as reflected in much artwork of that time period. Along comes the media and we seem to have lost that image of what real women look like.

[...] Its time to tell the beauty magazines that the models are not real people. They only help to create problems such as eating disorders. Remember the beauty magazines are printed for one reason, profit margin.[...]

Apparently, women are aware of the fakeness and non-reality carried by the popular imagery present in magazines (Cosmopolitan, Vogue, etc) and on TV (particularly criticized shows being Melrose Place and not surprisingly Baywatch). They are aware of the fact that the mass-media imposes on them an ideological body that is rather a glorification of artifices, fakeness and simulation than a "reflection of a profound reality."

Conclusion: The Triumph of the Simulacrum

Throughout this paper I have argued that computer-manipulated images allow one to mask and denature a profound reality. Further, when people start to imitate those images, they attain the third order of simulacra masking the absence of a profound reality. The abstraction has no referent of a reality, it is generated by model of a real without origin nor reality it is hyperreal.

The examples I have chosen illustrate how computer-retouching produced the ideological body. This ideological body is easily manipulated by digital programs like Photoshop. The ideological body can manipulate the norm in itself, it can take any desired form at any given moment.

What I would like to point out to conclude this essay is the absurdity of this process we have to attain that level of "abstraction" to actually realize that we live in a culture of simulation. Simulation has been around as early as the copy. Plato was even warning us about the copy-simulation because for him it was inferior to the original. With the Epicurian simulacrum, we can touch to the second part of the notion if the first one is defined in regard to the true and could therefore be qualified as inferior to the original, the second implies the possible use of a sign which has the same aspect, which conveys the same guarantee of authenticity, which is as Ôreal" as its source. For Epicure however simulacra are images, but not plain imitations, appearances in regard to an original or an idea. The images do exist, they are physical objects.

Baudrillard writes in "Figure de l'alterité" that "The real woman seems to disappear in that hysterical invention of femininity (but she has many more ways to resist that), in that invention of sexual difference whereby the masculine side is from the beginning the privileged pole and through which all the ideological and feminist struggles will be doomed to reconstruct either that very privilege or that unreconciled difference."[31] This may be true, but taken to a more practical basis I believe that the real woman has disappeared for long with media practices as I have tried to demonstrate it throughout this essay. Therefore I would like to quote Naomi Wolf when she stipulates in her controversial book The Beauty Myth, "The specter of the future is not that women will be slaves; but that we will be robots First, we will be subservient to ever more refined technology for self-surveillance...then, to more sophisticated alterations of images of the 'ideal' in the media 'Virtual reality' and 'photographic re-imaging' will make 'perfection' increasingly surreal. Then, to technologies that replace the faulty, mortal female body, piece by piece, with the 'perfect' artifice."[32]

We have to be warned against the temptation of the universe of simulation, where attempts to expediate life through technology result in a gradual enslavement, as in the case of women. Their obsession with the beauty as it is transmitted by the media eventually destroys them. This is the idea of the simulacra - the copy without the original. The universe of simulation seeks to destroy its creator to create a new world, a universe of simulacra.

As Arthur Kroker states: "Photography, cinema, Tv, and the internet are successive stage in virtualization. Beginning with the simulacrum of the first photograph, continuing with the scanner imaging-system of TV, and concluding (for the moment) with the data archives of the Internet, human experience is fast-dumped into the relays and networks of virtual culture. McLuhan was wrong. It is not the technological media of communication as an extension of man, but the human species a humiliated subject of digital culture." [33]

Notes

1. See figure 1. Adbusters Quarterly, Summer 1995, vol.3, No. 4.
2. Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. (trans.) Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Harbor The University of Michigan Press, p.6.
3. Burnett, Ron (1995) Cultures of Vision. Indiana University Press. Especially chapters 2 and 3.
4. Carpenter, Stacey. "Fair Use in Multimedia Digital Age Copyright." http//wcw.emory.edu/POINT/1.2.96/1.2.96.10.html
5. Henshall, John. "Beware False Reality." http//www.epicentre.co.uk/reports/9802bcs.html
6. Life, December 1986.
7. Dale O'Dell, Dale. "Computer-manipulated Imagery Is it Photography?" Apogee Photo Magazine http//www.apogeephoto.com/mag2-6/dell1_497.htm
8. Boyd, David. "What You Should Know about Digital Imaging" http//education.apple.com/education/techlearn/getstart/digital.html
9. Salgado, Robert J. "Adobe Photoshop Taking Newspaper Photo Departments by Storm," Editors & Publishers Interactive, April 4, 1997. http//www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/recent/040497n2.htm
10. See figure 2
11. See figures 3 and 4 Respectively police mugshot of O.J. Simpson taken June 17, 1994 and cover of Time magazine, June 27 1994.
12. Gaines, James R., Managing Editor Time, July 4, 1994 1441, p. 4.
13. See figure 5
14. Mirabella, Contents, September 1994 - http//www.finearts.yorku.ca/rwickens/Mirabella.html
15. Hammonds, Evelynn M. "New Technologies of Race" in Processed Lives Gender and Technology in Everyday Life edited by Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert. London Routledge, 1997, p. 113.
16. Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. (trans.) Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Harbor The University of Michigan Press, p.6.
17. As cited in Lipovetsky, Gilles. La Troisième Femme - Permanence et révolution du féminin. Editions Gallimard, 1997, p. 182, (my translation).
18. For discussions of the birth of star system see Fowles, Jib. (1995) "Mass Media and the Star System" by Jib Fowles, professor of media studies at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, In David Crowley and Paul Heyer (Eds.), Communications in History (2nd ed.; pp.207-214). White Plains, NY Longman. Other important discussions are in 1970 Alexander Walker's Stardom. New York Stein and Day. An equally impressive survey is Edgar Morin's Les Stars. 1972 Edition du Seuil Essais Point 3e edition
19. "Retouching Photographs" - http//www.halifax.cbc.ca/streetcents/scruples/airbrush.html
20. "Kyoko Data (DK-96) - The First 'Virtual' Idol in the History" Visual Science Laboratory, Inc(VSL) http://hightech.cplaza.ne.jp/1997/19970310/19970312/01/emain.htm
21. Media Literacy Strategies for Gender Equity by Peter Davison http://reseau.chebucto.ns.ca/CommunitySupport/AMLNS/violence.html
22. Glamour magazine, April 1998 issue, p. 190.
23. People magazine, March 6, 1996, p.71.
24. From http://www.something-fishy.com/society.htm
25. ibid.
26. Baudrillard, Jean. (1970) La Société de consommation, Denoel, Le Point (Folio essais no. 35), p. 139 (My translation).
27. People magazine, March 6, 1996, p.71.
28. For more information on cosmetic surgery, see http://www.knoxnews.com/health/cosmeticsurgery/cosmetic.html
29. Case cited in Kaiken, Elizabeth. (1997) Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 8
30. All quotes are from http://mightymedia.com/youth/new/noise.cfm (Emphasis mine).
31. Baudrillard, Jean. "Plastic Surgery for the Other," This article first appeared in Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume, Figures de l'alterité Paris Descartes et Cie., 1994. Translated version by Francois Debrix available at http://www.ctheory.com/a33-plastic_surgery.html
32. Wolf, Naomi (1997) The Beauty Myth. Vintage Canada, p. 267.
33. Kroker, Arthur in Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, editor Lynn Hershman Leeson. Bay Press, 1996. pp. 257.