A few months ago, I was approached by a design student in the UK who was undertaking their dissertation on fashion photography, with an emphasis on the different approaches afforded to image makers through both digital and traditional techniques. I answered a fairly extensive set of questions as a feature for the dissertation, and have decided to publish a series of select responses under the title ‘On retouching’.
Why do you think the industry is so obsessed with creating this almost unattainable level of perfection through retouching?
Well, from my position, I can see two different identifiable groups that make up this ‘industry’ when it comes to those who seek out retouching: image-makers and image-editors. Each of them seem to have fairly different reasons.
Now, for my day-to-day life, image makers usually means photographers, but it extends to make up artists, models, hair stylists, fashion stylists; really, anyone who has been part of a team that has created an image. Image-editors is usually a client one step above the image maker, at least in terms of financial hierarchy. So it might be a clothing designer who is comissioning a lookbook, or a makeup artist/hairstylist getting some beauty shots for their book, or a fashion editor at a magazine.
In some cases, there does seem to be a bit of a vicious cycle going on: a lot of photographers give me the impression they would prefer to focus on just the act of photography, rather than investing hours of post-production time into an image; clients, on the other hand, seem to want to push for every single pixel to be perfect, no matter how unrealistic it might be, or how it might impact on the image overall.
I think the clients want to push for as much perfection in an image as possible because, usually, they are selling something, and it appears that the general party line that’s been adopted is that retouching an image will always make it better.
Now, when you’re selling high-end luxury items, or beauty products, or really any ideology that elevates itself to the highest tier possible, I get that; it makes sense. Yet there is a whole spectrum of photography that is regularly being bombarded with that attitude as well, where perhaps it should just be left alone. I think, oftentimes, the minutes that should be spent asking the question ‘does this really need to be retouched? What value will this give an image? What will retouching take away from this image?’ are sort of glossed over, in favour of blindly demanding retouching.
As for the image-makers that do strive for that high level of perfection? I think it’s a combination of a few different factors. Firstly, for the most part, people just want to be able to have as much control over what they put out there; over the work they show to the world that they had a hand in creating. You can light a model better than anyone has ever controlled studio lighting before, in the history of light and image making, but you can’t control it enough to make a 6000 x 4000 pixel image display without the odd blemish on a 27 inch high resolution monitor. Despite the fact that raw file might only be printed at 8 x 10 inches, you’re staring at it at roughly the size of a small billboard and you are going to notice inconsistencies that you want to take care of. You’d need 200 reflectors the size of cocktail umbrellas to halo the models entire face in order to achieve that, which is hardly realistic. Though if no-one has thought of such a system yet, consider this paragraph my official patent pending notice.
For the majority of the history of photography, and fashion imagery, people have experienced the works of professionals through print and, to a lesser extent, film/broadcast media. When we encountered these works, we would be viewing prints, or reproductions in books, or through editorials or advertising in magazines, or even perhaps on film or television.
A lot of the time, we experienced them fleetingly; in the case of books, we had them on hand as a reference, and we revisited them when the urge fell upon us. It seems to me that, then, the focus was on encountering an image, and remembering that encounter. Now, we consume images much differently; the focus is all about owning a version of that image, in our own personal archive. This changes the way we approach looking at images. Additionally, ‘high definition’ dominates our image consuming (and producing) goals; it’s what we pursue, it’s how we see, in part, professionals creating a divide between themselves and amateurs, it’s how we define the term ‘high end’. We can save an image instantly, forever, and we can archive it and reference it and reblog it on Tumblr and let another 1000 people see it within minutes, on displays that, regardless of whether they can match the output or aesthetics of print, become our ‘standard’ for evaluating imagery. 10,000 different monitor calibrations and browser profiles means 10,000 different, sometimes radically so, final images, and editors of blogs the world over are more concerned with just pushing content, than ensuring images have embedded ICC profiles, for example.
In past decades, when print was the major medium for image consumption, you had many experienced professionals working closely, on all stages, on all aspects of production, of how those images looked when they went out for large scale public consumption. Now, consumers are able to pore over a high resolution image for hours, on a display that might be all kinds of horrible yellow or blue, or too bright on not contrasting enough. All of a sudden, everybody is far more concerned with how an image displays on an iPad, than how it will look in print. This creates new variables for a photographic image, and how it is consumed, and how it is read and viewed by consumers. This creates both a need and a desire for image makers to want to control as much of the production of the image as possible.