PressEthic

My routine check of Blinq led me to the blog written by RuPaul, which in turn led me to the portfolio of Glenn Feron, airbrush artist to the stars. Check out the drastic changes he made on some of the models. Be warned, though: nothing is even close to pornographic, but I wouldn't cruise some of these pictures around small children or my grandmother.

Now clearly, his work has no place in hard news. We don't retouch photos; this is a hard-and-fast rule. Courtney talked about body image a few weeks ago. These pictures feed into these issues.

Advertisers have their own set of ethical issues that I'm not getting into. But what about newspapers, or especially magazines, that use models to augment feature or fashion stories?

DigitalCustom, a company that retouches photographs, has listed on its website a set of ethical guidelines that outlines what restoration is considered acceptable or unacceptable. They are, again, looser than those which would be held by a newspaper, but their purpose is more to restore antique photos for archive purposes. But how fair is that? News-people are not supposed to touch up photographs, because doing so betrays the objective truth that is necessary in journalism. What about the objective truth necessary in history?

Are airbrushed models and retouched archives a betrayal of these truths? I'm sure most people would say that they know the models don't really look like that, but how surprised were you to see some of the contrasts? Most of the women are attractive even without the airbrushing, but their beauty is certainly more attainable. Does using the airbrushed copies betray readers, misleading them, fabricating the appearance of the women, and propagating standards that even the models themselves apparently can't reach without help?

As for the archives, DigitalCustom says:

It is impermissible to modify a historical image in a manner that would violate ethics pertaining to manipulation of journalistic images. Reference is made to the "DigitalCustom Model Rules To Preserve The Integrity of Images For Journalistic Purposes" (Release Version #2.0, March 1, 2003)(available at www.digitalcustom.com).

So, over to the section on photojournalism. Right away, I see some problems. For instance, under permissible procedures for "news/editorial" purposes, I find:

Cropping, darkening or focus-softening to reduce/eliminate superfluous material in a manner that preserves the context of the event.

Acceptable darkening? I think O.J. Simpson would disagree.

As a journalist, I would not use a picture that did not come out properly. To be fair, I'm no photographer, but I have taken pictures for my college newspaper when a photographer wasn't unavailable. Sometimes pictures came out poorly. The editors had a choice: use a bad picture, or use no picture. Retouching was never an option.

And in the case of historical photographs, while it is important to preserve the images of historical moments, some of the permissible procedures allow for changes that, although subtle, change the photograph. If a face is half-damaged in the photograph, for example, it is permissible to use a mirror image of the other face. Not all faces are symmetrical, though, so a person's very appearance might be altered. That doesn't sound very historically accurate to me.

I'm as self-conscious as the next person, and thanks to airbrushed pictures of models, I sometimes find myself wondering if the products advertised on magazine pages might work better than what I already use.

But while I might feel a little ugly and a little envious when I find out that a cover model has been airbrushed on a magazine, I would feel absolutely betrayed were I to hear the same about a history-book image ofAbraham Lincoln, who probably could have used it a bit more than Tyra Banks does, or worse, a front-page picture of Mayor Bloomberg on the front page of the Times. So read Cosmo with a grain of salt, and be glad it isn't the publication of record.