Summarize the article and write an essay based on the article
This writing placement course requires that you
o Read the article below.
o Summarize the article.
o Write an essay based on the article.
o Upload and submit one file containing your summary and essay.
First, read the article below. Instructions for writing and submitting your summary and essay follow the article.
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Digital Plastic Surgery
Sara Snyder
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Minneapolis, Minnesota
What phenomenon has intrigued you lately? When graphic-design major Sara Snyder asked herself that question, she had a ready answer: the use of digital retouching to perfect the images of female celebrities and models that appear on magazine covers and in ads. Casting about for a name for this concept, she came upon digital plastic surgery – a term that neatly combines two facts about the practice: that it is computer generated and that it is motivated by superficiality. The concept of digital plastic surgery is inherently interesting, and Snyder’s breezy tone and cascade of vivid examples make it even more so. As you read her essay, notice where it especially piques your interest, and why.
Forget plastic surgery. Today, makeovers are only a click of the mouse away. With digital imaging software, it is possible to remove blemishes and other skin imperfections, change hair color, and even alter body shape. Once viewed as the magazine industry’s dirty little secret, digital altering is now so rampant that virtually every celebrity image circulated today has undergone some modification. With advancements in imaging software, the manipulation of digital images is easier and faster to do and more difficult to detect. What once took hours to airbrush or consolidate can now be done in a matter of seconds by a well-equipped and savvy art department (Kennedy). As a result, digital retouching has become the norm in fashion and entertainment magazines, and has created a myth of perfect beauty – especially female beauty.
Using digital retouching, the fashion industry creates images of women so perfect that their real-life counterparts look ordinary by comparison. Cindy Crawford has said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford” (qtd. in Kilbourne). Computers and digital photography have ushered in a whole new era in the construction of the ideal image. In the past, photographers used cosmetics, camera angles, lighting, and airbrushing; today, that magic takes place on the computer screen. Moreover, digital retouching goes far beyond airbrushing, making it possible to dramatically alter faces and bodies or even to rearrange them.
Kate Winslet is known as a celebrity advocate for healthy, natural bodies. In the British GQ magazine, however, her legs and torso were digitally slimmed down, and her breasts were made to appear more pert (McNear). Although the actress had approved the original photos, she was not consulted about the digital changes. Winslet was rightfully upset about the editing. She said:
The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that, and more importantly, I don’t desire to look like that. I actually have a Polaroid the photographer gave me on the day of the shoot. I can tell you they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third. For my money it looks pretty good the way it was taken. (qtd. in “Retouching Is Excessive”)
The editor of the magazine eventually admitted the photos were altered, but to no greater extent than other photos normally featured in the magazine (McNear).
Kate Winslet is not the only celebrity to go through digital plastic surgery without her consent. Julia Roberts was outraged to discover that in the poster for the 1990 film Pretty Woman, a photograph of her head had been placed on the body of a more slender model (McNear). Nor was that poster Roberts’ last experience with digital manipulation. According to Jean Kilbourne in “The Murky Road of Digital Retouching,” a July 2003 Redbook cover featured a grinning – and out of proportion – Julia Roberts. As it turns out, the cover pose was constructed was from separate photographs: a shot of Roberts’ head was placed on an entirely different photograph of her body.
Redbook had treated Jennifer Aniston similarly on the previous month’s cover. The June 2003 cover image, a composite of three separate photographs of Aniston, made the actress look so disjointed that she considered legal action (Kilbourne). Phil Tsui – principal retoucher and partner at Resolution, A new York-based photo-retouching firm – says such composites are used far more often than the public imagines. “So many shots are pieced together; it’s only when they screw it up that it becomes an issue” (qtd. in Grossman).
Editors of the British magazine FHM were not happy with singer Nelly Furtado’s stomach, so they gave her a flatter, more muscular replacement before featuring her on their cover. To emphasize their handiwork, they shortened Furtodo’s shirt to just below her breasts. “I don’t like being misrepresented to my fans,” Furtado said. “You work hard to represent a certain thing and have a certain image, and somebody can take it all away with the cover of a magazine” (qtd. in Cobb).
After her release from prison, a beaming, fresh-faced Martha Stewart appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Well, at least her head did. The body was that of an unidentified model (Kingston). Newsweek responded to criticism by hiding behind the caption: it was clearly labeled as a false image; if readers assumed otherwise, it was their mistake.
Mark Kennedy’s article entitled “Photo Retouching: It’s a Question of Ethics” in the August 29th, 1997 issue of Greensboro News lists several more examples of digital retouching. Oprah Winfrey’s up-and-down weight struggle took a bizarre twist when the talk-show queen’s face was superimposed on actress Ann-Margret’s hourglass figure for a TV Guide cover in 1989. Actress Mira Sorvino complained when photographer David La Chapelle digitally altered her eyebrows, added a scowl, and superimposed another figure over part of her body for a photo spread in Allure magazine. Kathie Lee Gifford was given an electronic manicure in McCall’s. Premier realigned Jodie Foster’s belly button, digitally moving it a full three inches. In 2003, Kate Beckinsale asked for her breasts to be digitally altered for the Underworld poster because she felt they were not big enough (McNear). In USA Today, Tyra Banks said people are sometimes disappointed when they meet her because she looks so different from her photos (James). Virtually every picture in a magazine has been digitally manipulated in some way.
“Several of the celebrities who we retouch require quite a bit of work. In certain cases even the texture of their skin is completely rebuilt,” says Phil Tsui of Resolution. “They are certainly not the perfect images you see in the final product” (qtd. in Grossman). Some media go as far as to create completely fictional images. Mirabella magazine put a computer-generated woman on its cover. In another instance, a Swedish animator created a “model” named Webbie Tookay for a cell phone advertising campaign (Kilbourne). Some say this development marks the wave of the future, and that computer-generated models will begin to replace real people on magazine covers and in advertisements.
The CBS News program 48 Hours Investigates produced a special entitled “Extremely Perfect” to cover an unusual photograph on the cover of More magazine, a publication geared toward women over forty. The magazine featured an unretouched photo of actress Jamie Lee Curtis wearing next to nothing. “I said, ‘Let’s take a picture of me in my underwear. No lighting, nothing. Just me. No makeup. No styling. No hair. No clothing. Pretty brutal lighting,” Curtis says (qtd. in “Extremely Perfect”). Curtis’ motive was to demonstrate that the women who smile at us from magazine covers, billboards, and TV commercials never look so good in person (Kilbourne). “The whole goal for me with this was just that people would look at it and go like this, ‘Oh, I get it. She’s real. She’s just a person like me,’” Curtis said (qtd. in “Extremely Perfect”). In the interview printed along with the photo, Curtis told readers:
I don’t have great thighs. I have a soft, fatty little tummy. I don’t want the unsuspecting 40-year-old women of the world to think that I’ve got it going on. It’s such a fraud. […] No matter how beautiful or thin the model, she’s often retouched in some way to make her even more beautiful and thinner still. What the magazines are selling is beauty that is largely unattainable. People don’t look like this. People are flawed. It’s why we’re people. We’re flawed. (qtd. in “Extremely Perfect”)
In “Extremely Perfect,” More magazine editor Susan Crandell said the public’s reaction was 100 percent positive. “We got hundreds of letters from women saying ‘Thank you,’ and they were saying ‘You look like me’ or ‘I look like you.’”
Fashion magazine editor Leanne Delap states, “Retouching has permeated the industry both in advertising and editorially. Photos were always retouched for such things as skin tone or a crease in a skirt, but with new technology the temptation is to do more” (qtd. in Cobb). Current technology makes image-enhancing possibilities almost endless. “A good retoucher can basically make the person in the picture look better, enhance the way they look,” says Kate Betts, a former top fashion editor at Vogue and editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. “They can do anything. They can open eyes wider, make them brighter, change the shape, contour the face a lot” (qtd. in “Extremely Perfect”).
Jane Tallim – education director of the Ottawa-based Media Awareness Network, an educational group funded by major Canadian media companies – says the challenge is to help readers understand that most images in entertainment or fashion-oriented magazines do not reflect real people:
Only a small percentage of the population can meet the physical demands of a super model. But now, apparently, even they can’t reach the necessary standard of perfection. If Kate Winslet can’t meet the standard for a magazine cover, what chance do the rest of us have? It’s daunting. (qtd. in Cobb)
Models employed to sell products in magazine ads, or in the glossy flyers inserted in our morning newspapers, are rarely as perfect as they appear.
Harper’s Bazaar editor Betts remarks that “we do live in a culture that is about display, and I don’t just mean the red carpet. I mean everybody is concerned about their image, whether they’re Nicole Kidman or Jane Doe on the street. And I think image has become a big part of our culture” (qtd. in “Extremely Perfect”). Once viewed as the industry’s dirty little secret, digital altering is now so rampant that virtually every celebrity image circulated today has undergone some modification (Kennedy). Digital manipulation has become the norm in fashion and entertainment magazines and has created a myth of artificial beauty. In the words of Pascal Dangin, the digital retoucher for Hollywood’s fashion and celebrity photographers, “This world is not reality. It’s just paper” (qtd. in Hitchon et al.).
WORKS CITED
Cobb, Chris. “Digital Fakery: Happy, Healthy, and Fat.” Ottawa Citizen 2
Feb. 2003. ProQuest. 10 May 2005 http://proquest.umi.com.
“Extremely Perfect.” 48 Hours Investigates 2 Aug. 2003. 10 May 2005
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/28/48hours/main551362.shtml.
Furtado, Nelly. “Powerless (Say What You Want).” Folklore. S.K.G. Music, 2003
Grossman, David Michael. “It’s A-Listers versus Art Decorators in a Show-down.” Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management 1 Aug. 2003. 10 May 2005 http://preview.foliomag.com/design/marketing_ alisters_vs_art/.
Hitchon, Jacquelin Bush, Sung-Yeon Park, Sheila Reaves, and Gi Woong Yun. “If Looks Could Kill: Digital Manipulation of Fashion Models.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 19.1 (2004)
James, Renee A. “In Interviews, Celebrities Are Just Like Us. Sure!” Morning Call 10 Aug. 2003. ProQuest. 10 May 2005 http://proquest.umi.com.
Kennedy, Mark. “Photo Retouching: It’s a Question of Ethics.” Greensboro News Company 29 Aug. 1997 ProQuest. 10 May 2005 http://proquest.umi.com/.
Kilbourne, Jean. “The Murky Road of Digital Retouching.” Darwin Dec. 2003. 10 May 2005 http://www.darwinmag.com/read/120103/manipulation.html.
Kingston, Anne. “Now You See It, Now You Don’t.” National Post 2 Feb. 2002. ProQuest. 10 May 2005 http://proquest.umi.com.
Leach, Susan Llewelyn. “Seeing Is No Longer Believing.” Christian Science Monitor 2 Feb. 2005. ProQuest. 10 May 2005 http://proquest.umi.com.
McNear, Ramsey Edwards. “Photo Retouching for the New Century.” The Student Life 116.19 (2004) http://www.tsl.pomona.edu/index.php?article=679.
“Retouching Is Excessive Says Slimline Covergirl Kate Winslet.” Hello! 10 Jan. 2003. 10 May 2005 http://www.hellomagazine.com/film/2003/01/10/katewinslet/.
Sheringham, Sam. “The Camera Never Lies? Well, It Can Clearly Bend the Truth a Little.” Daily Post 3 April 2003. ProQuest. 10 May 2005 http://proquest.umi.com.
Snyder, Sara. “Digital Plastic Surgery.” Sticks and Stones and Other Student Essays. Ruthe Thompson, Rise B. Axelrod, and Charles R. Cooper. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 58 – 63.
Writing Instructions
Format and file details:
Submit your file as a Microsoft Word file, or, if you do not have Word software, save your file as a RichText file.
The filename should end .doc or .docx or .rtf. If you use any other software, your test may be rejected and you will
be notified to submit your test again using the specified format.
Submit only one file: you must save the summary and the essay into a single file. The database will not allow you to submit
two files!
Procedure:
Write a one paragraph summary of the article’s content.
Save your summary (and later your essay, in the same file) using this filenaming procedure:
Your last name_first name.file extension
Example: Smith_Kim.docx
In the same document, after the summary, write a 500-700 word essay on the prompt below.
Upload your file (one file only, with both parts, essay beneath the summary).
Digital Plastic Surgery by Sara Snyder
Writing Prompt:
In American culture, images of ideal beauty are sculpted by the
media. How do unrealistic standards affect your life? Write a 500-
700 word essay. In this essay explain how expectations, set by
others or yourself, have shaped your behavior in the past and influence
your choices about your future.
Save your file periodically as you work, and again when you have finished your essay.
Follow the online instructions for submitting your test.
FINAL IMPORTANT STEP:
Save and keep a back-up copy of your test file, before you exit the word processing
program and the Internet. If you are not using your own computer, save it to a
USB thumb/flash drive, or to the “Cloud,” or email a copy of the file to yourself.
