In this text, Fontcuberta explores the use of photo manipulation within current media. He primarily investigates advertisements and campaigns that Keira Knightly has been a part of. Fontcuberta looks at the King Authur promotional shots, where Knightly was starring as Queen Guinevere, the original prints look ‘sexy’ in her strips of leather that covered part of her torso; however, in the final images Knightly’s breasts were considerably enlarged thanks to ‘didgital technology’ in order to further sexualise the actress.
Fontcuberta then scrutinizes the actress’ Chanel campaign. The first images were fairly tame, as Kneigtly covered her breasts with a bowler hat. The following images were more revealing and Fontcuberta notes that yet again, her breasts were retouched. Other retouching controversies were also mentioned in this text such as the French Presidents love handle removal, this demonstrates that the retouching culture is not exclusive to females. Fontcuberta believes that “corrective’ digital retouching or ‘adjustment’ has become standard practice, a kind of default post-production process that is taken for granted. So, corrective digital retouching is not exclusive to sexy models and actresses but is standard practice for celebrity images.
The artist, Alison Jackson has taken a comedic approach to this new norm, in which celebrity images are impossibly beautiful. She simulates scenes of celebrities in scatological situations, such as Madonna ironing her underwear and George W. Bush appearing baffled by a Rubik’s cube. Unlike many other fake celebrity images, they are not ‘crude cut-and-paste’ jobs, Jackson takes authentic images with doubles.
Fontcuberta also notes that because of the advancement in image manipulation, ‘it is no longer necessary to resort to special diets, the gym, prosthetics or plastic surgery to achieve the obligatory perfect body.’ This is especially relevant in a case such as Knightly’s as the vast majority of images of her being manipulated and it has therefore altered the opinion on her appearance. It is interesting to look at French artist Orlan’s work as she subjected her self-portraits to ‘surgical operations’ in photoshop, in order to comply with what was seen as beautiful. Eventually, she layered all of the features together to create what Fontcuberta describes as ‘supreme beauty’ but this of course failed, and he described the result as a ‘shocking monstrosity’.
Manipulation had become accepted to an extent in celebrity photographs, as the public know that ‘photos are ‘treated with great care’ (manipulated) in one way or another.’ Yet on July 30th, 2006 a photo of Kiera Knightly shocked readers as there was a clear element missing from the image – her nipple. This sparked complaint letters from readers with one stating, ‘imagine photographs of soldiers – it doesn’t matter which war – was retouched and instead of guns, they held a bunch of roses or lilies. That would be falsified information, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s the same thing.’ Fontcuberta argues to this statement that ‘celebrity photos constitute a separate genre; they are not documentary or news… They are portraits often with artistic aspirations of public figures.’ It is defiantly more acceptable for portraits to be edited and it is seen as unethical to manipulate documentary images, but society is starting to question this. After complaints companies such as Asos have stopped using Photoshop to edit out features such as stretch marks on their models. If society keeps questioning the medias’ use of editing software then we may see more changes within the advertising industry.
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