Chapter four
Culture of manipulation

We are surrounded by photographic images which constitute a global system of misinformation: the system known as publicity, proliferating consumerist lies. The role of photography in this system is revealing. The lie is constructed before the camera. A "tableau" of objects and figure is assembled. This "tableau"uses a language of symbols [...], an implied narrative, and frequently, some kind of performance by models with a sexual content. This "tableau" is then photographed. It is photographed precisely because the camera can bestow authenticity upon any set of appearances, however false. The camera does not lie even when it is used to quote a lie. And so, this makes the lie appear more truthful. — John Berger, Another Way of Telling, 1982.

As it has been demonstrated in the previous chapter, retouched and manipulated photographs are invading the media and many cultural theorists argue that digital imaging technology is menacing the real, manufacturing a world of hyperreality. Some have even talked of a crisis of representation. However, what I want to argue in this chapter is that the manipulation of photographs tells us a lot about our society's standards. The new digital procedures cannot simply be reduced to a matter of technological improvement. It is therefore important to examine how the technology is used, by whom and for what purposes. The case of women's magazines will provide the primary basis for this analysis. In addition, this chapter will present some of our society's preoccupations that seem to be substantiated by the use of electronic imaging. The preoccupations I have identified are the following: Pursuit of eternal youth, fear of death, and dismissal of biology, negation of individuality, culture of cleanliness and will to control.

In 1990, when actress Michelle Pfeiffer appeared on the cover of Esquire in a low cut red dress, the caption beside the photo read: "What Michelle Pfeiffer Needs... Is Absolutely Nothing" (see figure 33). Nothing, except $1,525 worth of touch-ups, as Adbusters Quarterly revealed five years later, a sum Diane Scott Associates, Inc. charged Esquire magazine for the following work, described in a purchase order obtained by Santa Cruz's Media Watch and reprinted by the "journal of the mental environment:"

Clean up complexion, soften eye lines, soften smile line, add color to lips, trim chin, remove neck lines, soften line under ear lobe, add highlights to earrings, add blush to cheeks, clean up neck line, remove stray hair, remove hair strands on dress, adjust color and add hair on top of head, add dress on side to create better line, add dress on shoulder, clean up an smooth dress folds under arm and create one seam on image on right side. Etc... (see figure 34).

Today, photographs on the cover of almost every magazine have been retouched using computer technology. For most fashion and beauty photographers, to retire to their computers, after a photo shoot, to rearrange digitally their pictures has became an integral part of their work. As Robert Newman, design director for Details magazine, states: "There's a lot more retouching now than there used to be" (Kennedy, 1997: HREF). If retouching, indeed, has always been around, as we have shown earlier, the new digital technology makes it so effortless and fast, that its use is becoming systematic. What used to be a privileged treatment, reserved for the cover and a few selected photographs, is now so widespread that virtually every photograph one can see in a magazine has undergone some digital modification [39] (Tannen, 1994: 44). This tendency is especially flagrant in advertising and women's magazines [40] , two fields, which unlike other genres of photography such as straight or documentary never pretended to be realistic representations. Nevertheless, the fact that the use of digital imaging technology to enhance photographs is never clearly mentioned tends to suggest that lay readers may not be aware of these practices, or at least of their extent. Even if Lucy Sisman, a former design director of magazines such as Allure and Mademoiselle, believes that readers of fashion and beauty magazines are "sophisticated enough" to know that photographs are retouched (Tannen, 1994: 44), such a claim can be challenged. As Dan Couto, a Toronto-based photographer/graphic designer who specializes in digital imaging, states:

I'm aware, because I do it for a living, that computer effects are being used in a way that (ordinary) people can't tell that these effects are being used. Every fashion story is retouched to the point where every model has perfect skin... You feel sad for Fred and Wilma who buy products thinking they'll end up looking like these images (Singer, 1998: HREF).

Even though we are said to become visually more sophisticated and less inclined to accept the photographic "evidence," photographs appear still to affect us: they can move us, make us angry, laugh, dream or even feel guilty. Some cultural critics have even talked about "the power of the image" and have studied the effects of visual images on individuals or groups. Other theorists have often observed that the representation of women in the mass media is based on imagery defined by social and cultural forces which erase any trace of reality. Borzello and al. for instance write that "from its beginnings, feminism has regarded ideas, language and images as crucial in shaping women's (and men's) lives" (Borzello and al., 1985: 2). As a result, issues about the artificiality of these images, from stereotyped portrayals to plastic surgery, have been extensively commented upon. However, it seems that few have discussed the consequences of digital imaging technology further than as simple examples. This is worth noting, considering that in comparison, every digital abuse from officially acknowledged "serious" magazines generates pages of critics and analysis (see for instance the previously discussed cases of the moved pyramids on the cover of the National Geographic or the darkened photo of O.J. Simpson on the cover of Time). Women are not the only subjects of the technology; therefore, it would be simplistic to assume these practices are, as a lot of feminists would argue, only the consequences of a patriarchal society. Pictures of men are also retouched, whether they are simple models or public figures such as movie stars or politicians [41] . Nevertheless, one has to admit the technology is performed the most blatantly and the most systematically on images of women. As we shall see later, most of the recent cases of extreme manipulation have involved women.
This chapter proposes to first identify and discuss the different levels of manipulation, from simple retouching to more sophisticated procedures such as zipper heads. Secondly, it examines the characteristics of the manipulation made on the photographs of women and tries to understand what these procedures suggest about our society, what "myths" in a Barthesian perspective, they reveal.

Digitally-Constructed Images of Women

My waist is not thin, and my legs are not that long. As for the boobs we all know they are not real anyway. These calendar manufacturers and magazine editors all airbrush the photos to create the ideal which doesn't exist. It is ridiculous. — Jenny McCarthy

In the following section, I would like to discuss the different levels of women's digitally-enhanced photographs, as they appear in the mass media. There are indeed, different stages in image manipulation, from the moment when only simple, basic, retouching is involved - I shall refer to this kind of retouching as "cosmetic" - when the image simply "masks and denatures a profound reality" to the point where the image "masks the absence of a profound reality," (both orders of the image as defined by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation) which is when sophisticated alterations allowed by the nature of the technology are being used to generate images of women which have no relation to reality whatsoever, when the image becomes its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994: 6). Furthermore, we shall see how digital manipulation reinforces concepts central to the postmodern discourse in terms of construction and fabrication of the image.

Computer glamourization

The first category of digital alteration I would like to discuss, consists of basic, cosmetic touch-ups, such as the erasing of flaws, scars, blemishes, and notably wrinkles. I have chosen to refer to these practices as "computer glamourization." By using these two terms together, I want to point out that the construction of images of women descend from a long tradition. As we shall see, computers are only the latest developments in manipulating representations, and the idea of enhancing women through technology is not unprecedented.
The most blatant example of women's construction might be well comprehended, if one considers the process of "starification" deployed by Hollywood movie-studios from the 1930s on, a process usually referred to as the Hollywood star system [42]. In his study on stardom, The Stars, French sociologist Edgar Morin described the process to make a star, emphasizing its constructed aspect:

A talent scout is struck by a promising face in the subway. Proposition, test photo, test recording. If the tests are conclusive, the young beauty leaves for Hollywood. Immediately put under contract, she is refashioned by by the masseurs, the beauticians, the dentists, even the surgeons. She learns to walk, loses her accent, is taught to sing, to stand, to sit still, to "hold herself." She is instructed in literature, ideas. The foreign star whom Hollywood cuts back to starlet level sees her beauty transformed, recomposed, Max-Factorized, and she learns American. Then there are more tests: among others a 30-second close-up in Technicolor. There is a new winnowing-out. She is noticed, approved, and given a minor role. Her car, her servants, her dogs, her goldfish, her birds are chosen for her. Her personality grows more complex, becomes enriched. She waits for letters. Nothing. Failure. But one day or the next the Fan Mail Department might notify the Executive Producer that she is receiving 300 letters a day from admirers. The studio decides to launch her, and fabricates a fairy tale for which she is the heroine. She provides material for the columnists; her private life is already illuminated by the glare of the projectors. At last she is given the lead in a major film. Apotheosis: the day when her fan tear her clothes: she is a star (Morin, 1972: 51, my emphasis).

Once the star had been made, her/his near mythological status, as some have suggested, was maintained through carefully made up images which glorified the star's exceptional beauty. George Hurrell (1904-1992), dubbed the "Grand Seigneur of the Hollywood Portrait," contributed greatly to this: hired in 1930 as head of the MGM portrait gallery Hurrell's use of dramatic poses, sharp focus, high-contrast lighting and masterful printing techniques inspired a new genre: Glamour photography, and set a new standard for Hollywood portraits (George Hurrell Biography: HREF, see figure 36). This genre might offer some of the first obviously and intentionally constructed images of women (and men) [43] . As John Berger remarked in Ways of Seeing: "Glamour is a modern invention. In the heyday of the oil painting it did not exist. Ideas of grace, elegance, authority amounted to something apparently similar but fundamentally different" (Berger, 1972: 146). In their essence, Glamour photographs promoted a fundamentally hyper-feminine representation of women, but more importantly, inaugurated and capitalized on the reign of "manufactured" beauty. As Frances Borzello, Annette Kuhn, Jill Pack and Cassandra Wedd point out in "Living Dolls and 'Real Women'":

A good deal of the groomed beauty of the women of the glamour portraits comes from the fact that they are 'made-up' in the immediate sense that cosmetics have been applied to their bodies in order to enhance their existing qualities. But they are also 'made-up' in the sense that the images, rather than the women, are put together, constructed, even fabricated or falsified in the sense that we might say a story is made up if it is a fiction. (Borzello and al, 1985: 13).

Today, as Gilles Lipovetsky argues, the idea of the esthetically perfect woman is being embodied by supermodels and, in spite of all the things that separate them from movie stars, such as the fact that models are only supposed to be "professional beauties," these two idealistic figures of femineity have in common the fact that their perfection in photographs is the product of an extraordinary work of metamorphosis (Lipovetsky, 1997: 182). In this sense, supermodels are a continuation of the artificial Hollywood practices. Models are, just as movie stars were, neither unreal nor fictious: they are, in Lipovetsky's words "recomposed and surreal" (Lipovetsky, 1997: 182). However, if during the golden age of Hollywood, constructed images of apparently seamless perfection were the result of skilled professionals of appearance (photographers, make-up artist, hairdresser and stylists) and of basic photographic manipulation (studio lights, filters, airbrushing and retouching), nowadays, they are rather the fruit of the work of the magicians of the virtual era.
With a technology such as Scitex, if needed, models' faces can be completely restructured: lips can be made thinner or thicker, cheekbones might be moved higher, ears may shrink, and mouths may widen. Hair color or style can be changed, become more lustrous, and stray hair removed. Eyes may move, change color, their irises become more brilliant, and their whites whiter. Necks, arms and legs may lengthen. Picture editors and art directors also casually manipulate skin tone, eradicate wrinkles and blemishes, scrape off excess fat, and erase even basic human characteristics such as pores, bags under the eyes, or veins. Moreover, with such practices, models might find that they have miraculously lost weight in various places... and gained it in others. For Mary Tannen, author of an article entitled "That Scitex Glow," such retouching of female models is a clear sign of cultural rejection of the realities of women's bodies (Tannen, 1994: 44).

Computer-assisted Frankensteins

Moreover, digital image-processing technology allows very complex and sophisticated manipulations, undetectable by the naked eye. The results are often totally unrealistic, belonging to Baudrillard's third order of the image. One of the most common procedures, is known as "zipper heads" or "pasties" (Alter, 1990: 45 and Wian, 1998: HREF). Very similar in their principle to early photomontages, they consist of grafting someone's head, usually a famous person's, onto someone else's body, usually an anonymous model's, using computer graphics programs. Extensis Mask Pro 2.0 is one of these programs. A leading professional masking software for Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint, it allows to create "masks" (a selected portion of an image that will be grafted onto another picture) with clean edges (see figure 37).

The procedure was for example used by the distributors of the movie Pretty Woman for a publicity poster. The perfection featured on the image was literally composed, with the head of the film's star, Julia Roberts, implanted onto the seductively posed body of Shelley Michelle, a body double for many celebrities (Mitchell, 1992: 209 and Internet Movie Database, see figure 38). In 1989, the television program magazine TV Guide used the same quicker-and-less-painful-than-surgery method to produce their alluring cover picture of a conspicuously slender Oprah Winfrey, glamourously seated on a pile of money. To obtain this cover the talk show host was simply embodied as actress Ann-Margret (see figure 39). The deception was discovered when the actress' husband noticed a familiar ring on one of 'Winfrey''s fingers (Mitchell, 1992: 209). Even though the picture may not have been the result of digital manipulation, as sustained by Wired contributor Jacques Leslie who says that the image was not a photograph, but the drawing of an artist who used a photograph of Ann-Margret's as a reference, readers might not have caught the subtle trick and the magazine never mentioned the illustration as a composite (Leslie, 1995: 113).

For William Mitchell, such practices are meant to "present women as desirable boy toys" (Mitchell, 1992: 204). And, as he observes in The Reconfigured Eye: "The integral female subject is reconstructed as stereotyped sexual object" (Mitchell, 1992: 204).
A place where interchangeable heads have almost become a tradition as well as an example of women presented as men's object of fantasy, is on the Internet. As digital manipulation techniques are becoming more and more accessible, cheap and easy to use, virtually anyone is given the possibility to realize home-made montages, pasting the head of one's favorite celebrity onto a naked body. The result can then be disseminated, rapidly and uncontrollably, through the network. Therefore it is not surprising that web sites featuring allegedly "nude" photographs of popular media figures are proliferating [44]. The fakes range from simple nudes to sexually-explicit photographs. An entire usenet subculture, <alt.binaries.pictures.nude.celebrities.fake>, is even dedicated to posting these real and fake images, while another subculture is devoted to expose the less obvious fakes (Law Street Journal, 1998: HREF). In addition, many web sites such as "The Celebrities Naked Pasties Web Site" (<http://www.celebritynaked.com>) or "Scott's Fake Nude Celebrity Galleries" (<http://scottss.com>), specialize in archiving these fakes. Such use of digital technologies is clearly an abuse of celebrities' rights over copyrighted material [45], but it is also an abusive use of digital technology which tends to suggest that people are just a sum of features and body parts put together, a notion which is reminiscent of the genre of glamour precedently discussed. As we have seen earlier, Borzello and her colleagues write about glamour in their essay "Living Dolls and 'Real Women'." However, in the passage from the essay below, it is tempting to substitute the term "glamour" with the word "digital":

Glamour photography is very much open to the criticism that, at the same time as it holds out idealized images, in particular of women, it also promotes the ideal woman as being put together, composed of surfaces and defined by appearance. It is here that the glamour tradition in all its manifestations may be seen to occupy a place dangerously close to another tradition of representation of women, from myth to fairy tale to high art to pornography, in which they are stripped of ill and autonomy. Woman is dehumanised by being represented as a kind of automaton, a 'living doll': The Sleeping Beauty, Coppélia, L'Histoire d'O, 'She's a real doll!' (Borzello and al., 1985: 13-4).

If techniques are changing, it seems that intentions are everlasting.

Deconstructing Images of Women

Reality leaves a lot to be desired... — Abel Gance, filmmaker

Digital manipulation and retouching involve a very important component which I have not discussed so far: the intention of its author. As we have seen earlier, the myth of photographic truth has been based in part on the modernist belief that "the camera never lies;" that it was an instrument of neutral recording. Therefore, the manipulation of an image, should it involve digital or simple darkroom retouching, clearly indicates an intention of its author, a desire to change a certain representation of reality by interfering with it. As a consequence, the manipulation of photographs gives a new dimension to the debates over the concept of authorship. For postmodernist theorists, seeking out an authors' intention is pointless and Roland Barthes proclaimed "The Death of the Author" in his notorious 1968 essay. For him, the author is dead in the sense that s/he is no longer responsible for the meaning of his/her work and as a result, the reader becomes the key element in controlling the textual meaning. Nevertheless, the fact that these photographs are intentionally manipulated gives them a definitive connotative aspect that can be "read." In a way, one can argue that digital photographs are closer to text than analog ones. Literally, they can be read as a succession of ones and zeros while on a more theoretical level, the manipulations can be considered as a kind of "editing" or "rewriting." Because of this very characteristic, I believe that these images, manipulated on purpose, can be read and can tell us a lot about our culture as they represent, with the appearance of reality, what those who manipulate them value and fear. In a sense, these manipulations allow us to demonstrate the semiotics of photography. Photo-manipulation is more than just using a given technology, and the way it is used can help understand photographic representation as well as the values of our society. As Mitchell remarks, the emergence of digital imaging is an exciting "opportunity to expose the aporias in photography's construction" as it allow us to "deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure" and "resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition" (Mitchell, 1992: 8). In his words, "the tools of digital imaging [are] felicitously adapted to the diverse projects of our postmodern era" (Mitchell, 1992: 8).
I believe it is particularly relevant at this point to introduce the concept of the "myth," as Roland Barthes has defined it in one of his most celebrated early works, 1957 Mythologies [46] . Mythologies, which consists of a series of journalistic articles originally written for the magazine Les Lettres nouvelles between 1954 and 1956 coupled with a theoretical essay: "Myth Today," is a book concerned with the meanings of the signs that surround us in our everyday lives. It is a study of the ways in which mass culture, which Barthes sees as controlled by the "petite bourgeoisie," constructs a mythological reality and encourages conformity to its own values. As he writes in the preface to the 1970 edition of Mythologies: "I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating 'collective representations' as sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature" (Barthes, 1970: 9). Even if Barthes was concerned to analyze the myths circulating in the France of the postwar period [47], Mythologies is still relevant today since its author believes that it is important to expose signs as the artificial constructs that they are. To sum it up, Barthes is interested in the linguistic sign as in the application of linguistics to the non-verbal signs that exist around us in our everyday life. What makes this theory so exciting is the possibility of applying the methodology to the domain of culture defined in its broadest and most inclusive sense.
As Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt humorously sum up the content of the book: "Anything in culture can be decoded - not just literature but fashion, wrestling, strip tease, steak and chips, love, photography and even Japan Incorporated" (Appignanesi and Garratt, 1995: 74).
What I propose to do in this section is examine, in a Barthesian perspective, the use of digital retouching in women's magazines. What interests me here is to discuss not so much the unrealistic representation of women, but instead what each alteration says about our society. Put simply, I shall try to understand how digital imaging technology is used on photographs of women and what it reveals about our culture.

Pursuit of eternal youth, fear of death, and dismissal of biology

One of the most common, almost systematic, alterations performed on photographs of women is the erasing of wrinkles. What is ironic, while 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 when it comes to the opposite sex, it is very different... (Street Cents Online). As Bob Ciano, once art director of Life magazine, claims: "No picture of a woman goes unretouched... even a well-known (older) woman who doesn't want to be retouched... we still persist in trying to make her look like she's in her fifties" (Wolf, 1990: 82, my emphasis).
For feminist Naomi Wolf, the issue of retouching photographs is not a trivial one. According to her, "it is about the most fundamental freedom: the freedom to imagine one's own future and to be proud of one's own life." "Airbrushing age off women' faces," she writes "has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened" and "to airbrush age off a woman's face it to erase women's identity, power, and history" (Wolf, 1990: 83). As a matter of fact, the avoidance to show wrinkles and other signs of aging, is a clear dismissal of human biology. In the light of recent advances in the domains of biotechnology or even artificial procreation, it is not too absurd to argue that there is an undeniable aspiration to control nature and that digital imaging is just what may be the most "superficial" manner to achieve this objective.
The alterations performed on images of women are closely linked to fantasies of rejuvenation and agelessness. They disclose the importance America attaches to appearance and youth. As Lucy Sisman acknowledges it in Mary Tannen's article "That Scitex Glow," the hyperclean looks seems to be primarily an American obsession (Tannen, 1994: 44). Baudrillard even stated in his book America, though in another context, that "Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth" (Baudrillard, 1988: 34).
Nevertheless, what needs to be noted here is the close relationship between the photograph and death. This theme has been developed in depth by Barthes in several articles and especially in Camera Lucida. In an interview made prior to the publication of the book, for instance, Barthes said:

If photography is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death. It's true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more. Even if the person in the picture is still alive, it's a moment of this subject's existence that was photographed, and this moment is gone. This is an enormous trauma for humanity, a trauma endlessly renewed. Each reading of a photo and there are billions worldwide in a day, each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed manner, a contract with what has ceased to exist, a contract with death (Barthes, 1985: 356).

Talking about Barthes' latest work, Ron Burnett remarks in Cultures of Vision: "Much of the book is governed by an emphasis on death - the death of his mother, the death of photography as a form of cultural expression, the death of the interpreter" (Burnett, 1995: 33). In Camera Lucida Barthes remarks: "By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future" (Barthes, 1981: 96). For him: "It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached to be to the excited world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside of any generality (but not outside of any transcendence)" (Barthes, 1981: 97). With respect to what Barthes is saying, I would like to remark that by featuring younger-looking, and especially digitally-rejuvenated men and women in magazines, this "imperious sign" might be lessened, as the signs of aging, associated with death, are removed.
In an essay entitled "The Leech Woman's Revenge: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film," Vivian Sobchack examines low-budget horror films from the late 1950s through the early 1960s and demonstrates how movies such as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), The Wasp Woman (1959), and The Leech Woman (1960), "unravel our culture's complicated response to aging women." For Sobchack, this response is based on fear and loathing. She remarks that in these movies women are portrayed as both scary and scared. For Sobchack, their scariness has "less to do with sexual desire and castration anxiety than with abjection and death." As she quotes from The Leech Women: "For a man, old age has rewards. If he is wise, his gray hairs bring dignity and he is treated with honor and respect. But for the aged woman, there is nothing. At best, she's pitied. More often, her lot is of contempt and neglect." Sobchack brings up another important point when she remarks how "increasingly technologized quotidian life of our culture" has become and argues that the current ideal body is the "ageless 'hard body' of the 'cyborg'" (Sobchack, HREF). This statement, about the current ideal body, reminded me of the images of fashion photographer Seb Janiak, in the French edition of Elle magazine, in January 1997 (figure 40). These pictures, which unsurprisingly illustrated an article on cosmetic surgery, were momentous, showing a bold Naomi Campbell covered from head to toe in silver paint. Janiak, well-known for his work with computer-imaging technique, "only" adjusted some colors and digitally smoothed the model's skin to obtain the metallic finish. A small caption at the bottom of the opening photograph read: "Beautiful... To what point? When fantasies of perfection are almost science fiction" (Elle, 1997: 92). I believe these pictures' meaning is dramatically increased by the context in which they are used. It is important to recall here that context is an important part of a photograph since it is what gives the image most of its meaning, helping us comprehend what it depicts. In the essay "Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning," John A. Walker states the importance of context in the attribution of a meaning to a photograph and argues that images do not have a stable meaning on their own. As he writes: "With each shift of location the photograph is recontextualized and as the context changes so does the meaning" (Walker, 1980:54). The "Digital Naomi" picture, used in different circumstances, such as on the cover of American Photo to illustrate a subject on "The Digital Revolution," is to some extent less compelling, since it is not textually associated with plastic surgery (see figure 41).
In addition, it is interesting to note that if Elle's beauty editors christened Campbell a "cybergirl," the supermodel, when shown her portrait, is reported to have declared: "Wow! I look like a robot!" (<http://www.pathfinder.com/Life/eisies/1998/cat01f03.html>). This is a provocative thought, considering what Naomi Wolf was writing in her controversial book The Beauty Myth, almost a decade ago, in 1990:

The specter of the future is not that women will be slaves, but that we will be robots [48]. 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 (Wolf, 1990: 267).

Without necessarily being so pessimistic about women's future, there is a need to assess the realities of our capitalist society to explore fully its imagery. The diet and cosmetic surgery industries have been accused of exploiting and capitalizing on the unrealistic images of beauty promoted by the media. In the United States, millions of women spend billions of dollars in the quest for the ideological body and the market of the products supposed to help in attaining this ideological body is massive and unending. In 1996, the weight loss industry, alone, was estimated to generate in the United States an impressive $33 billion in revenue; a threefold increase in less than thirty years (People, 1996: 71). Moreover, in the meantime, the market for plastic surgery developed into a $5-billion-a-year industry and is increasingly considered part of the natural order of things for women [49]. As Kathryn Pauly Morgan writes:

Not only is elective plastic surgery moving out of the domain of the sleazy, the suspicious, the secretively deviant, or the pathologically narcissistic, it is becoming the norm. This shift is leading to a predictable inversion of the domains of the deviant and the pathological, so that women who contemplate not using cosmetic surgery will increasingly be stigmatized and seen as deviant... (Morgan, 1991:148).

With a culture relentlessly pursuing and literally obsessed by an ideal of everlasting youth, it is not surprising that women try to emulate these images by virtually all means necessary and through operations such as facelifts, augmentation mammoplasty (breast enlargement), mastopexy (breast lift), abdominoplasty (tummy tuck), liposuction , rhinoplasty (nose job), browlifts, blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery), etc. It is as if American women felt defined as inadequate against the ideal unattainable female object of beauty promoted by the mass media and needed to compensate for not "being born with it."
As some have observed, our Western culture is constantly emphasizing looks and appearance, two notions based primarily on youth. Jean Baudrillard, for instance, writes in America: "The body has been made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost" (Baudrillard, 1988: 35). According to Baudrillard, the pursuit of the youthful body indicates one's anticipation of death and fear of failure (Baudrillard, 1988: 35). Today, the preservation of the body is being achieved mostly through technology and in a sense, Photoshop "surgery" used in magazines can be considerated as the virtual equivalent to plastic surgery.

Negation of Individuality

Another interesting aspect of retouching, and this is true especially for fashion and advertising photography, is the erasing of any trace that can suggest individuality. In a society which pretends to ignore and sometimes even favor differences, use of digital retouching to erase any distinctive signs such as scars, moles - except, of course, for some supermodels whose distinctive signs have become their trademark - or tattoos off the bodies and faces of models suggests just the opposite. Everything that suggests individuality is removed.
As Sara Halprin notes, the range of the images of women in the media is extremely narrow, "much narrower than the range of men's images" (Halprin, 1995: 253).
As it has been widely acknowledged, the image of women in the media is definitely not representative of women's diversity (race, color, size, weight, etc). The most fascinating however, is that retouching is performed on models who are supposed to fit in the narrow range determined by editors and advertisers in the first place. Nevertheless, even these women do get retouched to fit the unnatural/virtual ideal promoted by our society.

Culture of cleanliness and will to control

Finally, I would like to point out the esthetic element involved in photo-manipulation and the will to control it conveys. In her article on computer-manipulated photographic imagery, Martha Rosler states that "The rational is that visual appeal and cleanliness (so to speak) of images, not photographic accuracy, are the criteria in these uses" (Rosler, 1996: 41). The "necessity" to offer readers a visually pleasing cover is in most of the cases the main reason behind retouching. This practice reflects the obsession of our culture with immaculate perfection.
As a matter of fact, a recent faux pas from French magazine Paris Match perfectly illustrates this last statement. Indeed, when the editors of the weekly magazine wanted to feature on the cover a photograph of Princess Caroline of Monaco with her then potential future husband Ernst-August of Hanover attending a party and none of the pictures they had would illustrate properly the "chemistry" between the two of them, they simply decided to create what should have been the perfect shot. If they did utilize one of the pictures at their disposal, it did not happen without some modifications: they erased an intruding person who came in between the pair and moved them closer together. The final picture presented the image of two smiling persons apparently pleased to pose for the camera (see figure 42). Other European magazines published photographs of the event that were less blatantly manipulated (see figure 43). This case, very similar in its intention to the Giza pyramids episode, is not in its essence a lie: the two persons were there together and it is highly probable that at some moment they may have been closer to each other and the photograph could have existed without any manipulation. However, even though the "picture perfect" image did not exist, Paris Match still wanted to offer its readers a compelling cover (one that would sell better). A month later, after the alteration was revealed, the editors justified their decision. In a kind of Mea Culpa, in which they swore not to manipulate another photograph without informing their readers, they explained that according to them: "The cover of Paris Match has to meet a certain esthetics, certain criterions of balance and plastic beauty." They stated further that for "evident esthetical reasons," they accepted generally the idea of performing touch ups on movie stars, supermodels, even eventually even on political leaders. As they argue, for many photographers retouching is considered as part of the art of photography (Paris Match, 1998: 99). Nevertheless, Jacques Clayssen summarizes perfectly (and bluntly) the current situation when he observes that the pages of magazines are invaded by a "virtually antiseptic cleanliness" (Clayssen, 1996: 75).

Conclusion »

Notes

39. The technique is so widespread that sometimes magazines are suspected to have performed more changes than they claimed to have made. For instance, Details raised some controversy when it was claimed that the magazine had tampered its February and March 1999 covers. The first cover, featuring Elizabeth Hurley, was attacked by several British newspapers which claimed that the actress' bust had been digitally enhanced by nearly 30 percent. The second cover, which showed Denise Richards totally nude and wrapped in a thin strip of film, was denounced by an industry insider who claimed that the actress' head had been stuck on top of another woman's naked body. According to the source, the tampering was apparent since the size of the body in the shot was entirely out of proportion to the size of the head. The magazine denied all the allegations. (Johnson, 1999: HREF). [back]

40. As well as men's magazines - though the images are of.... women: Playboy for instance is renowned for airbrushing its nudes to offer "perfect" images to its (male) readers. [back]

41. It is worth noting that a "political variation" of cosmetic retouching exists and that it obviously involves primarily men. Paris Match's editors once admitted to eventually retouch the photographs of political leaders so that they appear wrinkle-free and without disgraceful defects in their magazine. Moreover, some politicians may even require it. See for example the photograph of Stalin published to celebrate the Soviet leader's sixtieth birthday (figure 35). As David King notes: "Stalin's skin has been positively pancaked, his hair and mustache are now as smooth as a matinee idol's, and the glint in his eye is all that remains of the original (King, 1997: 98). [back]

42. For discussions of the birth of star system see: Fowles, Jib. (1995) "Mass Media and the Star System" by Jib Fowles, in David Crowley and Paul Heyer (Eds.), Communications in History (2nd ed.; pp.207-214). White Plains, NY: Longman. Other important discussions is available in 1970 Alexander Walker's Stardom. New York: Stein and Day. [back]

43. If George Hurrell pioneered the genre of glamour in Hollywood, the Studio Harcourt created similar portraits in 1950s France. Roland Barthes has analyzed the iconography of Harcourt in "L'Acteur d'Harcourt" in Mythologies. It seems however, that this text was not selected in some of the English versions of Mythologies.[back]

44. Internet industry estimates place the 1998 revenues for celebrity nude sites at about $185 million. It is, reportedly the fastest-growing segment of the online adult industry business (Law Street Journal (1998, May 1), <http://www.lawstreet.com/journal/art980501brief.html>). [back]

45. The law is rather unclear when it comes to photomontages and few cases have gone to court. Nevertheless, on December 23, 1998, a federal judge ordered a webmaster to pay $230,000 to actress Alyssa Milano for publishing nude photographs of her on the Internet, without her permission. Many of the photographs were "pasties," whereas other where still frames from movies in which the actress appeared naked. This is believed to be the first decision of its kind (Brunker, 1998: HREF). As the market for celebrities' nude is growing (Webmasters charge up to $30-a-month the access to these pictures), Web site operators are more an more tempted to create customized nudes. Therefore, even artists who have never gone unclothed, can find themselves in a sexually explicit position on the Internet. [back]

46. In Structuralism and Since, John Sturrock calls Mythologies Barthes' "most ferociously anti-bourgeois book" and labels it "devastating" (Sturrock, 1979: 53). [back]

47. It is interesting to note that one of the important development in the postwar years in France was the growing popularity of weekly and monthly magazines, particularly those aimed at a predominantly female readership, such as Elle (founded in 1945), Marie-France, Marie-Claire and Femmes d'aujourd'hui. Publications like these interested and irritated Barthes. He even went so far as to describe Elle as a "real mythological treasure" (Barthes: 1970, 78). [back]

48. An uncredited variant of Eric Fromm's quote "The danger of the past is that men become slaves. The danger of the future is that men become robots." (in The Sane Society). [back]

49. I would like to mention here the work of Kathy Davis who opposed the common argument that women who undergo surgery are "nothing more than misguided or deluded victims" (Davis, 1997: 168). Rather, she claims that plastic surgery can improve women's assertiveness. In addition, for her, more than the effect of the act itself, it is the decision to take this act which is empowering for these women. Davis has studied the reasons, choices and positions regarding plastic surgery in Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (1995, New York: Routledge). [back]