It's a re-touchy subject
In which I try to answer the questions I always get about magazine retouching
The other day I said ‘Ask Me Anything’ on here about magazines. And so many of you came back wanting to know about retouching. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s still such a point of interest and controversy. As my friend Stacey said to me, ‘I’m interested to know if people still feel as strongly about it now as they did 10 years ago, seeing as everyone uses filters on social media on themselves.’
Here’s my stab at explaining how it all worked in my time. But I must stress I am talking about my personal experiences. I certainly can’t speak for the entire industry on this.
The armchair experts are wrong about quite a lot of it
I have no patience with the most common assumption about retouching: that is, that someone looking like Jabba the Hut turned up to the photo studio and then by the time we were done with them they looked like Barbie.
Think about how immeasurably less stressful my job would have been if this were true.
Instead of wrangling with model and celebrity agents and working for months at a time to get them, and the very best photographers in the world on board to shoot for my magazine, I could have just dragged in the paunchy 55 year-old on the security desk, taken some pics on my phone and got busy in post production until he looked like Margot Robbie. In fact there would be no such thing as model agencies; if ludicrous amounts of retouching was a routine practice, there would be no need for such organisations to weed the genetically blessed from all us muggles out here. Models wouldn’t get paid life-changing sums of money to front ad campaigns because it just wouldn’t matter who the hell held up the bottle of Poison if you could make them look incredible after the pics were taken.
On that note, oh boy did this ad used to make me so mad.
It’s good and healthy to be aware that retouching goes on. That not everything you see on a billboard is literal reality. But just because this, above, is what’s possible doesn’t mean that this is what we all did. I can’t be the only one on earth who always thought Dove got so much adulation and credibility for all this stuff when not only was it not the reality of what was going on in media, but they were also a company who were still selling products to women for ‘skin firming’ and everything else. Weren’t Dove the ones also telling us we were all beautiful just the way we were?
As a magazine editor, particularly one who was editing print products while witnessing the birth of the digital age and social media, I can tell you that I was painfully aware of how angry retouching made readers. So if and when we did it, I was a complete pain in the arse about making sure it was minimal.
I’m not asking to be congratulated for that. I know plenty of you will feel that retouching is immoral, full stop, and I have respect for that view. But it’s complicated.
Somtimes even people who say they don’t want it, want it
I will not name this actress but she is super famous, has long been celebrated for being ‘real’, ‘celebrating her curves’ and rejecting Hollywood’s pressure to slim down. When she appeared on the cover of Glamour, her publicist phoned me because she - the actress - was upset that she looked ‘fat’ on my cover. She didn’t look like a rake, no, but she did look beautiful. It was a classic example of what I’m talking about. We didn’t go nuts with the retouching and everyone was mad at us about it. I have sympathy for why the actress may have felt that way: it’s a dire world where you can be beautiful and a normal size and there are still gross casting agents moaning that you won’t get the job because you didn’t look right on that mag cover or red carpet. We’re all, apparently, a bit trapped in this system.
This is the kind of madness you come up against.
As I’ve mentioned before, a magazine editor is but one in a whole room full of stakeholders when it comes to photoshoots. I had to co-operate and negotiate with photographers, stylists, make-up artists, hairdressers, the subject of the photos and their legion of agents and publicists. All of these people are creatives who would feel as invested in what they were doing as me, the editor. All of those people felt strongly about how a picture represented their work.
In particular, photographers could be intensely paranoid souls when it came to how model and celeb agents would view their pictures, and I do get it: if you take a picture of a celebrity that the agent hates, then he or she won’t let you photograph any of the rest of their major celebrities. Most publicists control an average of about a dozen major names, so piss them off over one client and you’re banned from interacting with the whole stable.
Which explains why I often found myself in stand-up rows with photographers when I thought their retouching had gone too far. Even if I had been the kind of editor who liked a six-feet-wide thigh gap, or a face that looked like plasticine, I knew how much it angered readers, so I didn’t want it. So I’d sometimes find myself going into battle with photographers who were absolutely convinced their careers would be over if they didn’t give an actress a glass-like face. For their part, I suspect many publicists were fearful of an actor’s agent being furious if the pictures were less than perfect: if an actress is not looking ‘perfect’, the agent reasons they will not be first in line for work.
I don’t know for sure, but I would bet money that the publicist of the actress I mentioned at the top here, never let the photographer who took the ‘fat’ picture near any of her other clients again.
People would sometimes see it when it wasn’t there
The whole retouching issue became a popular stick to beat magazines with.
A good example of this is many years ago when we photographed Adele for the cover of Glamour. I was shocked when Adele told me I was ‘brave’ for putting her on our cover. This was because she was not a size 8. But I never saw it that way. Truth be told, there were some internal rumblings about it being ‘a risk’ but bloody hell, she was on her way to becoming the most famous singer in the world - if Glamour wasn’t the place to celebrate this British powerhouse, where the hell was? (My smugness when it sold in excess of 650,000 copies must have been unbearable, but no regrets.)
It was precisely because I knew everyone - including tabloid newspapers - would be dying for us to do something spectacularly sizeist with Adele’s pictures, I was on high alert. I don’t for a second believe anyone in my team was looking to alter her body shape in post production, but I made a point of laying down the law anyway. No way was I letting anything about retouching become the story when there were so many other great things to say about this incredible talent getting her first major women’s mag cover.
So I was beyond exasperated to receive complaints from readers that we had done too much retouching on her.
This has happened many times with other shoots I’ve been involved with over the years. I think it’s because people want to believe that no one can possibly look like they do on a magazine cover. But they really can.
What people are in essence complaining about - when they believe they’re looking at retouching when I know they are not - is that we had put make-up on someone. That we did something fancy with their hair. That we put them in clothes that suit their shape. That we lit the studio to make their skin glow - yes, probably more so than it does when it’s lit by Sainsbury’s fluorescents.
The complaints in these instances are that we made the person in question look the very best versions of themselves for their photo shoot - a photo shoot that will be seen not only all over the UK but around the world.
Is that wrong? It becomes a difficult thing to arbitrate on if we’re cross about make-up and volumising spray. Should everyone be forced to look absolutely unfiltered, unenhanced, in any way at all?
And if so, where does that leave the visual art of photography? I’m not arguing that for a highly commercial magazine like Glamour. But when you get into luxury, coffee-table magazines like the international Vogues, shouldn’t there be some creative license for the world’s elite creatives to just make beautiful, arresting imagery? It can’t be done if you take away all the tools that will make an image more beautiful than it might have otherwise been.
I’m not saying we didn’t do it
Of course I’m not saying that. I guess I just don’t see retouching as this great evil, when to me it’s the same principle as enhancing a person with hair and make-up and lighting.
I also agree we must be responsible with its use. You can find bad practice with retouching, the same as you can with anything else in life. But it’s such a fine line between making a picture that sells your magazine, makes the person in the picture glad (not horrified) that they agreed to work with you and balancing that with social responsibility. It’s worth adding here too that, personally, I think if you go nuts with retouching it’s so insulting to the subject of the photo. I would never have wanted anyone to look at a photo I produced and make a mental note of all the ways I ‘fixed’ their perfectly good face.
I found retouching a useful tool in ways that might surprise you. For example: A cover star's best facial expression might be in one picture, but the much better, cover-worthy outfit in another. So we’d swap our favourite head onto that outfit. It was rare that we did that, but sometimes I was so thankful that I could get the best of both worlds for a sellable image. Is that bad? We didn't change her. If everything was wonderful about a photo except a piece of hair flying right into her mouth, we could delete that hair. Is that bad? I don't think so.
There was a rival magazine of ours who, on more than one occasion, photographed an anonymous woman wearing something straight off the catwalk and then superimposed the head of an actress onto that body; an old photo of her they had in the drawer from previous shoots. This was all with the permission of the actress in question and her publicist. It was their way of getting around not being able to get time in the diary with said actress. It made me furious - furious that I hadn't thought as creatively about getting my cover stars.
Retouching was more commonly used for things like, if the colour of a major advertiser's dress just wasn't being done justice in a photograph, we’d colour match it to reality. Sometimes it would be fun to play God if, for example, a sky in a beach shoot was a disappointing dull blue. We could bump it up to something more vivid - I mean, we’d paid a fortune to fly to that beach, why not make it look as idyllic as possible?!
Eradicating it wouldn’t eradicate body dysmorphia
I’m off to walk the dog in a minute. I will probably see another woman out there who I will, for maybe even just a flicker of a second, clock as ‘prettier than me’. We all do it.
Being aware of the unreal realities of modern media is a useful thing. We need to remind ourselves that not everyone looks the way we think they do after seeing them on a billboard or on a film screen - especially when filtering, retouching, distortion etc is way more rife and unregulated on social media than it ever was in my time in print media.
But ending it would not stop the human instinct - illness? - of ranking each other based on our beauty. I wish I had the answer to that one. We will not find the solution, though, in trying to protect everyone from the evil sight of pretty people.
That’s a whole other conversation which we can have here soon.
Love hearing your take on this. Totally agree it has a time and a place, good retouching is an art form in itself.
I think it’s very much on the consumer/ reader to take advertising across all platforms with a grain of salt. I love that make up brands are now showing pores and imperfections but their is also very well placed lighting and highly skilled makeup artists behind an image.
Well stated and explained. I love hearing professionals speak about the “why” and “how” of their work