The Photoshop Beauties: Before and After
Usually we don’t realize the hours of photoshopping spent on magazine and advertising images before publication. The raw photographic material reveals a lot about the fine craft of ‘beauty construction’. The photo above shows documentary maker, former soap actress and challenger of the beauty industry Sunny Bergman, before and after ‘the photoshop’.
Sunny’s latest documentary Beperkt Houdbaar (Limited Preservation) makes a powerful analysis of the cultivation of the body for the beauty industry’s economic benefit. We are looking forward to her contribution at the Powershow Next Nature in LA.
The photo is part of a larger photo series of new feminists by Manon van de Zwaal & Monique Bergen Henegouwen for HP de tijd magazine. I would love to see some reversed photoshopping done on the magazine models of which we haven’t seen ‘the before’ as well.
Stine Jensen.
Myrthe Hilkens.
Photos: Manon van de Zwaal for HP de tijd magazine. Image retouche: Monique Bergen Henegouwen /MissMo.nl. See also: Virtual Miss, Simulacra for Dummies, The Photoshop Reporters, Natural Breasts, Hyperbreasts, Modernistic Vaginas.
Awesome. Though the end result is a bit too much on the uncanny valley side on the first and last image. The second one is exceptionally well made, except for the jaw line. That makes me remember the Dove clip two years ago.
this is amazingly creepy!
very cool photoshop work, but creepy images. they definitely look better in the “before” photos. but if i never saw the “before”, i would think the “after” was real.
Little social experiment I did with photoshop:
http://www.nikanika.com/photoshopme.htm
Nice example Rosa Maria. By doing such an experiment with your own picture, you must have in mind an ideal image of the woman you want to be or… how you want others to see you according to ‘the standards’.
And so it happens that the value of ‘beauty’ is inadvertently being carried out through these kind of video’s:
http://www.nextnature.net/?p=956 (Dove) and http://www.nextnature.net/?p=2110 (Foster Farms).
But if carried out thoroughly over the internet, we will grow mediated and come to recognize whether an image is real or not. So it’s videos like these that help us develop new sense-organs like the ‘photoshop-antenna’. It’s my hope that everyone with a photoshop-antenna will also develop a true sense of beauty whithout too many cosmetical, economical and social side-effects: just BSUR
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/6231/myrthehilkens5301.jpg
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/6204/stinejensen530.jpg
http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/8076/sunnybergman530.jpg
What do u think
?
the last girl looks so much better natural than photoshopped! that photo in particular is proof that the winning ‘beauty proportions’ cant take into account what is beautiful about someone’s lack of perfect symmetry.