Apr 24, 2008

Photo Altering - an historical look

I saw an article a few months ago about how parents are Photoshopping the heck out of their buck-toothed, wrong eye colored, freckled children to make them look perfect. Okay, removing a blemish or braces from a senior photo is fine, but changing eye color or giving your teen-age daughter a photographic breast augmentation or slimming a chunky child is a bit over-the-top in my opinion. But apparently it's happening - a lot. Your kids will grow up with a very false sense of their true look. That's just wrong. I always wonder what will happen when the dorky-looking couple from Extreme Makeover who fell in love have a baby. Do they KNOW the child will come out looking like they both did before they had half a million dollars in cosmetic surgery? Then what? They hated their look enough to subject themselves to the show. What will they do with their child?

Anyway, photo tampering is nothing new. However, I do find it more disturbing when the press tampers with photographic images than when someone tries to stretch themselves a bit to lose 5 pounds. Click HERE for a brief history in "Photoshopping" and air-brushing. It goes back nearly 150 years! Which means as soon as there were cameras, there were people trying to alter photos.

2 comments:

Aimee said...

I am one of the few people that I know who DON'T do a bunch of stuff to their pics....I may crop in or sharpen up a photo but that's about it....even my dorky pics of my dorky self. It's sad, really, that people have this need to make their lives look perfect.

Kim said...

I'm with you - you get what you get! I don't take wrinkles off my face or pounds off my rear. Of course, I'm guilty of avoiding the camera, too.