Picture Perfect

Whoever said pictures don't lie obviously had no inkling of the game-changing graphic design technologies of our times. Digital retouching has become a pervasive instrument of doctoring reality in photographs to remove imperfections and exceptions in people, objects and occurrences, and replace them with manufactured appeal. So much so that some weeks ago, a French member of parliament proposed a Bill making it mandatory for altered images in newspapers or magazines, and subsequently billboards, product packaging, and campaign and artistic images, to carry a disclaimer acknowledging touch-ups.The argument is that photographs that lead people to believe in realities that don't actually exist - in this case, chiselled bodies and supernatural features - breed negative self-images and damaging complexes. More recently, a clothing label admitted to using a digitally altered photograph of an unusually emaciated model in Japan, even as it fired her in real life for being 'too large'. Sometime ago, the world's largest software maker was forced to issue a public apology for a race-swap when eagle-eyed Web users found that the company had pasted a white man's head on to a black man's body to make a promotional photo on the Polish version of its website work better with the locals. A Toronto activity guide had earlier drawn flak for pasting a black man into a group family shot on its cover to project an image of ethnic inclusiveness.
Digital alterations have given us the power to orchestrate pictorial realities by masking or accentuating certain aspects of situations and people for reasons ranging from perfection to political correctness. What we haven't realised, perhaps, is how this obsessive quest for perfection and political correctness is making us ever more disillusioned, intolerant and self-loathing. Strange dichotomies and double standards are at play: we struggle inside to accept individual peculiarities, but want to be seen by the world as embracing social diversity. To understand how this duality lends itself to inauthentic representations, look at the social networking and dating sites on the Web, where 'photoshopping' one's photograph for flawless and dainty features is as de rigueur as singing paeans to intrinsic beauty, honesty and open-mindedness in the accompanying text. In times of wrapper worship, the self, together with its sensibilities, must also become a commodity to improve its shot at acceptance. Is it any wonder, then, that we are possibly at our sceptical best today, pictures or otherwise?