Set Photoshop to Thinspiration

[essentialsaltes]

It would be easy to make fun of fatness or cosplay, but I wish to probe the philosophical question:

At what point does a photo of you become not a photo of you?

Here is a retouched photo of me from New Year's.

Comments

[jimkeller.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't fault anyone who looks like the image on the right for Photoshopping the picture to give herself a more attractive BMI, like the image on the left...

But, seriously, I don't think an image necessarily needs to be Photoshopped to be misleading. I've known models who have made a career on being extremely cameragenic from certain angles, knowing those angles, and encouraging photographers to take advantage of them. These ladies (mostly, so I use the female pronoun) weren't retouched, but if you saw them in person you'd never believe they were the subject of those drop-dead-gorgeous photographs. Similarly, if you shoot a photo from an angle that accentuates your musculature and hides your fat, to the point where people say, "Is that YOU in that photo?" then it's also a misleading photo. Same is true if some random confluence causes a snapshot to look remarkably not-you.

Using Photoshop to remove blemishes, for example, is fine if the subject would not normally have blemishes. But if you're photographic a pizza-faced teenager, who will always have blemishes as long as he's the approximate age he is in the photo, then you're not accurately representing the teenager.

So, to me, the issue is not so much of whether or not you've changed the model or subject to the point of unrecognizability, but whether or not it's appropriate to do so. If the point of the photo is to say, in your online personal, "this is what I look like," then any change that can deceive someone is highly inappropriate. However, if I'm trying to sell you beer and I take a photo with a hot babe hanging on a frumpy guy who drinks the beer, then Photoshopping the hot babe long past the actual threshold of human beauty is not only appropriate, it's good business.

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Certainly art and advertising call for different standards of appropriateness. We accept and expect lies like this

I guess what I was getting at (though I confess I didn't really explain my reaction in my post) was that this picture (and the others linked through the picture) weren't intended as advertising or art. Presumably, these are taken at anime/cosplay cons and the subject is having them altered to flatter their appearance and/or better recreate the original character. And then they can say, "this was me cosplaying X at AnimeFetishCon."
But in what sense is it really that person? Say, take this example. That's not her chin, not her jaw, and... er... those aren't hers either. I'm more than happy to overlook the improvement in skin and shaving a few pounds off to produce a more ideal 'me', but these other changes are so extreme that it seems it's no longer a representation of 'me'. It's the character, and perhaps the enjoyment of the picture is knowing that she's somewhere underneath all that (Look, that's totally my belly button!)