As of late, Photoshopping in the media has made a big ... well, appearance in the media. To begin with, there are the countless side-by-side comparisons of celebrities to their smoother, skinnier, dimple-and-blemish-less doppelgangers, which provide, in equal measure, feel-good fodder for insecure Interneters — and who wouldn't be, bombarded by impossibly unattainable images of beauty, as we are? — searching desperately for some touchstone against which to gauge their own relative merits, and ammunition for the trolling masses eager to tear down already-under-pressure celebs for any mercilessly revealed flaws.
The phenomenon, and its reported links to social problems like teen bullying and eating disorders, has caused whole governments to consider, and in some cases implement, laws banning the use of Photoshop in magazines, or to require that photos retouched past a certain threshold have a small disclaimer, similar to a copyright mark or safety warning on a product, stating that the picture has been altered. (The first peer-reviewed studies, sponsored by Microsoft, led to the passing of a law in Israel in 2012; though similar bills have been proposed in individual US states, it seems unlikely that such a law would soon pass in free-speech-friendly America. However, France, Britain and Australia have also taken up the cause.) Even more fascinatingly, there's the popularly lauded but questionably effective Photoshop Trojan Horse sponsored by Dove that reverses airbrushed changes and implores the media not to alter our perceptions of real beauty. Taken together, these events have come to embody our dual preoccupation with and unease over the importance and (im)mutability of appearance in our society – the fickleness and changeability of the individual image, and the persistent omnipresence of imagery as a whole.
Yet despite obvious problems with pervasive manipulation of the media that assault us 24/7, it’s understandably difficult to take an objective stance and draw lines when the project of photographing — indeed, of image-making in general — necessarily implies a somewhat disingenuous substitution or conflation of the object, the image, with truth. It’s been occurring since the advent of photography, yet it's a problem that is more easily tackled on an emotional, visceral level — perhaps nowhere so powerfully and evocatively as in this music video created by Hungarian Artist Boggie — than on an intellectual and objective one.
Not that it hasn’t been attempted in the past. In her famous collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sontag outlined the effects that easily producible and consumable images were already making on our lives in the 1970s. “Photographic images,” she observed, “do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” In this way, she argued, photography creates not only a sense of truth and authentic testimony, but also a sense of ownership with regard to the subjects captured (is this word so often chosen to mean "photographed" a coincidence?), establishing within its users a “chronic voyeuristic” attitude toward the surrounding world. She wrote:
The camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.
Knowledge that feels like power, of course, being a particularly destructive force when one considers much of what society spends its time photographing: that which is unknown (the “other”), and that which is coveted. Take, for example, those endless pictures of starving children or the pervasive low-angle aerial photograph capturing corrugated-tin-roofed shanties disappearing into the distance. Along with such images comes a frighteningly self-assured ability to analyze, patronize, “fix,” and otherwise control that which seems unfamiliar and pitiable. Likewise, steadily streaming images of the desired body, made ever-more desirable through the act of digital manipulation, create the strong inclination to evaluate such images against each other; with the power to photograph a woman comes the power to see how she measures up, to judge her, and to judge others by proxy.
As the game progresses, it wraps up not only the initial players – those being photographed and those doing the photographing – but increasingly, everyone who is exposed. As we are bombarded by progressively more unattainable images in advertising, we are invited to feel insecure — for this is the advertiser’s aim. Use this product or that, they say, and you too can be as improbably smooth and svelte, as dubiously polished, as this model. But in addition to perhaps being ensnared into using a product we don’t need, we also encounter a new unwanted need: the need to affirm our own symbolic self. We are called upon to augment the growing world of images with proof of our own existence, willing our being into pictorial permanence alongside the countless unreal images perceived as reality.
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs,” Sontag declared, “is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted."
It seems almost trivial to point out that for this project, the explosion of social media is more than bespoke. But writing almost two generations ago, Sontag was able to presage this addiction’s present form, noting that photography had already become “almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing,” as much a consumer tool of power and violence as a car or a gun.
Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon — one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. It’s as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger. Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.
Photography, then, was no longer a pure art form, but rather a mass art form – a utility, an instrument. “It is mainly a social rite,” Sontag wrote, “a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”
What anxiety is that? Less tangible, less measurable than the anxieties over appearance, which are quantifiable in dollars made, products sold, and teenage lives lost to despair and disease, is something more insidious, more pervasive, and every bit as damaging. Something like the fear of not existing at all.
Scientists now refer to a Facebook Syndrome or Facebook Depression – brought on not just by the addictive qualities of social networking, but by the impulse – almost an imperative – toward very filtered, very strategic self-framing – a manipulation of the truth almost as a bold as the airbrushing practiced by today’s advertising industry. In a Huffington Post article titled I Facebook, Therefore I Am, writer Pamela Newton comments,
Facebook has taken on less and less the character of a social networking site and more and more that of a massive image-maintenance machine. Everyone posts photos of their beautiful vacations, their beautiful babies, their beautiful spouses, their beautiful homes. In other words, their beautiful lives. I'm not saying people don't have beautiful lives, but on Facebook, everyone's life is so damn perfect. And the number of likes or comments they get on photos and status updates is a gauge of how well they have convinced the world that their life is perfect. Which, judging by the plentiful likes and comments, is pretty damn well.
It's strange, because we all know that in real life, people's lives aren't perfect. Jobs are boring. Relationships are messy. Raising children is complicated and exhausting. Travel is riddled with challenges. And this doesn't even address the various psychological and emotional struggles we all face. (Whoever reported a bout of nihilistic despair in their status update? A panic attack?) But we can't resist the lure of other people's self-created versions of themselves, any more than we can resist the lure to similarly self-create and stay in the game. It's the Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses of this decade.
It’s the logical conclusion of a phenomenon that Sontag identified in the 1970s, in commenting on the prevalent use of photography in tourism. It would be almost unthinkable, she remarked, to take a trip these days without taking a camera. Images are relied upon to validate experience, and to mediate between the experience and the thing experienced. But with the advent of social media, the incessant need to document, to validate, and to mediate (the word, of course, from which media arises) has extended beyond the restricted realm of travel and vacation, making every moment of our lives, from a night out dancing to the breakfast we prepared this morning, fair game for the social media spectacle. She explained that photographs
help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.
These souvenirs become building blocks, the ephemera out of which we construct the story of our lives, and which we imagine others – tireless researchers and constructors themselves – sifting through to draw their own conclusions. It’s an automatically and relentlessly self-aggrandizing game, planting and curating our own artifacts, putting us in the position of archeologists imagining the excavation of our own identities. According to Sontag, “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
She also points out the underbelly of such a scheme, the natural contrapositive to her observation: “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”
Of course, as exciting as such a project can be, it is also overwhelming in its scope and consequences. If we stop participating, pause the game, it’s almost as if we cease to exist. Sontag’s insights, prescient in the ‘70s, are almost eerily axiomatic in today’s milieu of dizzyingly fast-paced production — not only of work activities, but of play.
Way back in 2010, the average Facebook user generated more than three pieces of content per day. By January 2014, Facebook's 1.26 billion members used the 'Like' or 'Share' buttons about 22 billion times per day. Social media users, not un-self-aware, have a whole new lingo for what they do – 'Food Porn' describes the obsessive documentation of meals prepared at home ("New Fave: quinoa-hemp granola with organic yogurt and strawberries! Yummmmm!") or plates presented in fancy restaurants, much to the consternation of their creators. And 'Selfie' is now the accepted term for what was, heretofore, simply a picture of oneself . . . though as digital self cataloging becomes the new norm for social participation, perhaps the dedicated term, with its pert and somewhat plastic ring, is appropriate.
The anxiety to which Sontag referred two generations ago – wherein tourists used compulsive picture-taking as a salve against the feelings of guilt and inefficiency which would otherwise arise during leisure-time activities like travel – has now extended to every corner of normal life, even the preparing of dinner.
The coping method, she pointed out, “especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic — Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”
As we clock more and more hours plugged in to social media, constructing the story of ourselves in this way, one has to wonder if we are sacrificing our right to truly experience our own lives to some imagined compulsion to document those same lives, confusing real, lived experience for the digital experience we construct.
The metaphor is particularly poignant as the format of social media comes more and more to reflect the biological. When Facebook retooled the Wall as the Timeline, the digital forum came less to reflect a physical space – a meeting place where we could socialize – and more to act as a stand-in for the body itself, our online avatars now having the ability to participate in a biological arc filled with milestones. And as these Timelines become populated with milestones – in photographic and anecdotal form – it is both an affirmation and a repudiation of our real, lived bodies. For the artifacts both attest to a life lived, and scramble to counter, or even prepare for, ultimate demise. As Sontag wrote,
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
It’s a chilling paradox, as all addictions are: that which seems so tangibly to sustain us is the very thing that saps us of our vitality — but how do we escape?
For a culture so seemingly rooted in the production and trade of images, it’s a difficult question. But just as Sontag intuitivlely grasped the difficulties of photography that would arise nearly two generations after her celebrated work, she also provides, to some degree, an antidote:
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.
Remembering this – that photographs are as much an artistic interpretation of the truth as any other medium – helps us distinguish between between lived experience and the barrage of images that seek to portray some other, modulated or arranged or purely imagined, version of things. And to this end, we can begin to analyze, contextualize, and even appreciate the messages coded for in the medium.
Once we have this sort of distance from “photo as truth,” we recapture our own power as conscious, living, experiencing individuals – whether we are the teenage girl constantly faced with impossible ideals of beauty, the lonely worker trapped in a cubicle, clicking absently through the artifacts of our friends’ latest adventures and pining for some of our own, or simply a tourist, taking the time to capture a snapshot in our own memories — of how a something looked, felt tasted — rather than frantically chasing “the perfect shot.”
Source: KISSmetrics
