Sunday, July 22, 2007

Mass-marketing female forgery That catchy phrase comes from Jezebel, which isn't on my usual reading list, despite its intriguing tag line "celebrity, sex, fashion, without airbrushing." But a note from Gerald Grow, the journalism professor behind one of my favorite classroom torture devices tools, Newsroom 101, got me to take a look. He alerted the AEJMC magazine division mailing list to a Jezebel feature last week, one of the best jobs I've seen of deconstructing an art department's shaving, softening, trimming, filtering and dehumanizing a photo of a good-looking human being into a typical cover-girl cartoon. In this case, it was Faith Hill who lost facial lines, a few pounds and some bone structure to the Photoshop artist's cropping, smoothing and "healing" tools. All the animated and annotated versions of the picture need is a "kids, don't do this at home" label for anyone fighting Photoshop's temptations to excess. Like Jezebel, I'm at a loss to see "just what Redbook editors/art directors found so abhorrent about an already-above-average 39-year-old country music star and mom to three that they had to retouch her into something more befitting the cover of Cosmopolitan." Gerald and I apparently weren't the only new readers, judging from Jezebel list of blog items about its article. See "The Week You Gave Us Faith in the Internets." Now if someone would just airbrush the minds of people who waste synapses on celebrity gossip. ("I'd do her husband," was one Jezebel reader's comment in the Faith Hill discussion.) 1:02:24 PM    comment []

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