Touch-up: Photoshopping is all around us

Amelia Gough (L), Lara Clare Kingsbeer, and Nellie Jenkins from <i>Top Model</i>. Photo / Supplied

It's two weeks before the first model struts down a catwalk at New Zealand Fashion Week and local designer Cybele Wiren is still casting for her show.

While some overseas designers are refusing to use models who are too thin or too young, Wiren has no such qualms: No restrictions.

"When we are selecting models I'm looking for an attitude and a presence and a look," she says.

Oh, but they do need to fit into the sample size garments. Size, small.

Her job is to design clothes, not to oversee models' wellbeing. She has previously cast girls as young as 14 years, and is happy for guardians to accompany them backstage but says it is up to the agencies to make sure they are looked after.

Last weekend, the Herald on Sunday's revelation that TV3 digitally altered images of New Zealand's Next Top Model contestants to look thinner was not the big shock. The real surprise was that the image retouchers butchered the images so badly. Contestants Amelia Gough and Lara Clare Kingsbeer were left looking as if someone had taken to their legs with blunt snips.

It took less than a week for more allegations of photo tampering to hit the Top Model franchise. Promotional material for the new season of America's Next Top Model, which premieres in the US on Wednesday, appears to show the bodies of two contestants on the same pair of legs.

Utter the word "Photoshop" to most people who work in the fashion or magazine industry and you will be met with a shrug of indifference. All images, they say, are doctored.

In the digital era, images can be manipulated any way its creator desires. Slimmer. Taller. Change skin colour. Swap body parts. Nothing is impossible and nothing is illegal.

Even news organisations are not bound by law when it comes to the images they publish but operate under self-regulating policies. The industry standard is to allow the enhancement of photographs for clarity and definition but altering the composition is a big no-no.

The manipulation of images is spreading. Political candidates put their best face forward on campaign posters and individuals enhance snapshots they post online.

But politicians around the world are calling foul on the proliferation of unrealistic images, particularly in fashion and celebrity media. UK Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone wants a health warning on airbrushed photographs, telling viewers they are not real. French MP Valerie Boyer is advocating the same move in France.

In July, Australia's Federal Minister of Youth Affairs Kate Ellis released voluntary guidelines for the fashion and publishing industries that have been dubbed the "skinny model code of conduct".

The code contains a range of recommendations designed to promote positive and healthy body images by:

* Disclosing when images have been retouched and refraining from enhancing photographs in a way that changes a person's body shape by, for example, lengthening their legs or trimming their waist or by removing freckles, lines and other distinguishing marks.
* Only using models aged 16 or older to model adult clothes on catwalks and in print.
* Refraining from using models who are very thin or male models who are excessively muscular.

In New Zealand, Women's Affairs Minister Pansy Wong says the Government has no plans to legislate to control photographic touch-ups, but she is urging media to accurately portray women.

"New Zealand women come in all shapes and sizes," she adds, "and we should be celebrating that diversity, rather than promoting unrealistic expectations about body shape."

As Auckland gears up for another New Zealand Fashion Week this month, the issue of excessively skinny models is again under the spotlight. The New Zealand fashion industry line is that local models are a healthier size than overseas.

Theresa Peters, acting agency manager for Eden (Eating Difficulties Education Network): "We see clients who are affected by the images they see in the media. We also have seen clients who were in the fashion industry and saw an enormous amount of pressure to be below a certain weight, and that very much affected their eating habits and mental wellbeing."

Eden teaches media literacy and critical analysis courses in schools and the wider community educating people on what goes into creating the glossy photographs. Peters supports the idea of labelling altered pictures.

"Those images are selling product and that's the way the fashion industry are putting them out there, but I think the public has a right to know they are being manipulated and these are not real images," says Peters.

The YWCA also supports more transparency from the fashion industry. When the Australian code of conduct was announced the organisation lobbied Youth Affairs Minister Paula Bennett to adopt a similar policy. It received no response. Bennett refused to comment for this story. Sarah Davies, YWCA strategic development manager, says groups around the country are reporting young women feel pressure to be someone they are not and are developing low self-esteem and eating disorders.

One of the first magazines to sign up for the Australian code of conduct was Australian Women's Weekly whose editor-in-chief Helen McCabe announced her magazine would begin labelling digitally-altered photographs of celebrities.

In Auckland, Next magazine editor Christina Sayers Wickstead thinks having a health warning on manip-ulated images is a "fantastic idea".

"The more women know, the more positive it is for them," she says.

However, photographs in Next undergo some digital polishing.

"We do Photoshop, and the reason we do it is because when you don't sales aren't the same," says Sayers Wickstead.

The trick when adjusting images, she says, is enhancing without turning them into cartoons. It's knowing there is beauty in Cindy Crawford's mole and the gap in Lauren Hutton's teeth.

Occasionally, Metro and North & South art director Jenny Nicholls carries out "kind surgery" on ordinary people.

Models are another story. "I've often Photoshopped a model to make them look fatter," says Nicholls. One turned up for a shoot looking far more emaciated than the photo on the modelling agency website, she says: "Her arms looked like Belsen victim arms."

Top photographer Monty Adams thinks warnings on photographs is "crap". "Models are young, they're slim, they're tall. Not everyone is like that. It's unrealistic from the word go. It's got nothing to do with Photoshop."

Adams has no qualms doing whatever it takes to get the best image. He swaps heads on to different bodies and shaves models thinner.

"If a model's got a bit of a saddlebag, why not pull it in a bit? I don't see anything wrong with it. Anyone who is photographed, if they've got something wrong, a big blotch or a pimple, bag under the eye, unfortunate lighting or whatever, you don't want those amplified on a magazine cover. Get rid of it, thank you very much."

Adams photographed the flattering campaign posters of Helen Clark for the last general election. The result, he insists, was as much the magic of lighting, makeup and photographic trickery as digital enhancement.

"She was never as doctored as everyone said. If you photograph Helen Clark straight on her teeth look straight. Her teeth were never straightened, maybe lightened slightly, that's about it. The whites of the eyes cleared up. Absolutely."

But fellow photographer Charles Howells has seen first hand the level to which deception can go on. He worked in New York shooting superstars such as Britney Spears, Beyonce, Jay Z and Black Eyed Peas. "We did major, major surgery to the point that one of the celebrities wasn't even the celebrity. It was a supermodel's body and they dropped her head on it and it became her album cover."

Howells runs a studio in Auckland specialising in beauty and fashion photography.

After being asked to significantly manipulate photographs for a "real women" magazine story, he put his foot down. He stopped doing anything to his images that misrepresents. He will Photoshop to remove skin blemishes and anything else that detracts attention, e.g. flyaway hairs, but won't change body shapes.

Photographer Karen Inderbitzen-Waller believes there is too much retouched work in New Zealand. She prefers to get the basics right - casting the right model and getting lighting and makeup perfect rather than fixing it up later digitally. "Retouching shows a lack of skill and certainly ruins the final image," she says.

Perhaps it's the willingness to "fix up" valuable celebrity clients - clients whose faces are money - that explains why Adams gets jobs to photograph Keisha Castle-Hughes, Judy Bailey, Robyn Malcolm and many of the TVNZ and TV3 campaigns.

Denis Dutton, philosophy professor of arts and aesthetics at Canterbury University, says the manipulation of images is nothing new. It goes back to Stalin deleting people he had liquidated from photographs. Yet we are still learning to determine what is real or not in media.

Dutton calls health warnings "infantile".

"Do politicians really so underestimate the populace that they think a warning ought to go on a fashion image?

"Maybe every woman who uses makeup ought to have a warning tattooed on her neck.

"The entertainment media, in general, traffic in fantasy. In that respect, the manipulation of images is a legitimate part of the job of entertainment producers. We shouldn't expect it to be otherwise. On the other hand, news editors have the responsibility to present to us undoctored realistic news images. These are not difficult distinctions for anyone to make."

Nonetheless, there have been some notable slip ups in the news world. This newspaper breached its standards in 2005 when it published a photo where a designer had shifted a flying cricket bail a few inches to fit on the page. The then editor apologised and said it wouldn't happen again.

The Economist ran into controversy when its June 19 cover showed President Barack Obama looking downcast on a Louisiana beach during the oil spill disaster. He was not alone but the woman he had been talking to was edited. The magazine insisted the composition was changed for clarity, but the publication was heavily criticised for manipulating the image's meaning.

While manipulation of news images is rare, there are instances. Reuters' photos of the Lebanon War were doctored to make damage look more severe and French paper, Le Parisien, published a picture of French footballers with a dismembered hand resting on a player's shoulder - his image had been added into the group later.

New Zealand Press Council principles state: "Editors should take care in photographic and image selection and treatment. Any technical manipulation that could mislead readers should be noted and explained."

The Press Council receives few complaints regarding the manipulation of images. The last complaint to be upheld was against Investigate magazine's September 2007 issue. The Press Council found a story about Air New Zealand flying US troops to Iraq lacked fairness and the cover montage of an armed soldier, a queue of people and the familiar Koru on the tail of an Air New Zealand jet was misleading and inaccurate.

The fashion press tends to fly beneath the Press Council's radar. But it doesn't take much cyber-sleuthing to discover 52-year-old Madonna does actually have wrinkles and Jennifer Aniston is not as blemish-free as we are led to believe - photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com is a good place to start.

Should you wish to dabble in your own electronic makeovers, there are websites which give step by step instructions on how to "sex up your Facebook photos".

Even Next editor Sayers Wickstead admits to sexing up her image. Despite her magazine's support for images of "real women", wrinkles and all, the photo that accompanies Sayers Wickstead's editor's letter is - shall we say - put through a rigorous production process.

"It's not like if a mate sat opposite and clicked one shot, we'd look like that," she admits.

But she is careful not to distort her look too much through retouching: "Other-wise I'd turn up to events and you wouldn't want people to be disappointed."