Yikes

Jess McCabe·
Life

PhotoshopDisasters has turned up a really extreme example, this time by Maxim Mexico. Check out the anatomically impossible waistline:

tinywaist.gif

Via Jezebel

Jess McCabe
Editor at large

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8 Responses

  1. Aye, they’ve scanned a double-page spread and tried to photoshop out the page fold, leaving her with no waist and a short forearm.

    Apparently, she had a ‘normal’ sized waist before the dire shopping job, which as we all know, makes the ad much better, and doesn’t press patriarchal beauty norms on women at all…

  2. I don’t know what the original is like, but it is the result of a page fold.

    If you look her forearm is half the length of her upper arm.

    Looks decidedly creepy though.

  4. Heh… I somehow doubt that even the ‘non-photoshopped’ had a ‘normal’ waist. Even a short foray into photoshop disasters or Jezebel will turn up many examples that don’t have that as an excuse…

    Actually, it’s funny, because whilst this is the result of a page spread, it’s so typical of badly photoshopped images that it doesn’t surprise me at all. And that’s even more worrying. Aren’t we all getting a bit too reliant of photoshop?

  5. Thanks, Jess, for bringing this brilliant blog to our attention! I think people should be made more aware of how standard photo-shopping is, it seems that unless it is pointed out it often slips under our radar. I have linked to PhotoShop Disasters over on the Uplift news feed now.

    Another great display of ‘beauty being in the post production’ can be found in this video;

    http://www.fubiz.net/blog/index.php?2008/05/19/1616-room-post-production

  6. Anne Onne – you say “Aren’t we all getting a bit too reliant of photoshop?”

    A bit too reliant on photoshop for what? For providing “idealised” images?

    In my work (design) we use photoshop a lot – and there isn’t an image out there that hasn’t had the treatment. Not one. Nada. Even the ones that don’t appear that way, even food, buildings, landscapes, everything.

    But I want to talk about photoshopped images of women. The create an image of “beauty” that can not be obtained no matter how much you work out, starve yourself, wax, pluck, tease, tan, lighten, etc. etc. (on until forever the list goes!). I don’t know how this can be stopped because every advertiser wants to promote the most “perfect” image they can (or at least perfect in the sense of imposed normative standards). Morals never come into it. HOWEVER, what I would like to see is more admission that the images we are looking at *are not real* and cannot be obtained.

    I once was flicking through Vogue (years and years ago now, before I stopped buying women’s magazines) and I noticed that beside the model where it listed who sold the clothes and who did the make up, one little line – “Image Manipulation by…” – it listed right there on the page who had worked the photoshop. It was admitting that the image wasn’t real! Right there! Personally, I would like to see transparency about this with all photoshopped images – especially those related to the appearance of human beings.

    Is this what you mean?

  7. I know. But photography did exist in a time before photoshop, anc can exist independently of it.

    But yes, that’s what I was referring to. The pervasive photoshipping of images of people to look completely different, but passed off as photographs, not an image that is admittedly manipulated. I would love that transparency, and I would also love a different way of working with things, were less photoshopping is used as a whole. I know there are a lot of things that it is essential for, but at the same time, if we got society to question its need for manipulating images of people to such an extent, maybe we’d have less desire to do all that to photos of people in the first place.

  8. Anne – Yeah, I totally agree. I think that creating an honest transparency about the manipulation of images would create less of a desire to do it in advertisers. I think that the “perfect” images would still have an effect on buyers, but to a lesser extent. And massive photoshopping jobs would be criticised. People aren’t gonna buy something that blatently doesn’t exisit.

    There is a big difference between wiping out a pimple or smoothing down skin to creating impossibly thin bodies that show no bones or creating a tan where the product hasn’t even touched the model’s body.

    I know there has always been airbrushing, but the technology has moved on so fast that I am not sure people are aware just how much you can change and manipulate an image now. And that really isn’t fair.

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