A Ban on Photoshop? This One's Personal.

It's come to this: A prominent New York Times scribe supports government-coerced speech.

Randy Cohen, the paper's self-styled resident ethicist, is in favor of mandatory warning labels on advertising images that have been Photoshopped. He hints he might even support a ban on such images, analogous to a law that Britain's Liberal Democrats have been pushing. (French parliamentarians have also been clamoring for mandatory warnings, with fines of more than $50,000 per violation.) Cohen got religious about the issue in the wake of the Ralph Lauren skeletal-model controversy.

Let me start here: I desperately wish that some kindly art director at the Times would digitally correct Randy Cohen's too-magenta, overly-shiny, yellow-toothed headshot (at right). Long live Photoshop!

And I advise anyone — Times pontificators, social activists, legislators — to keep their damn noses out of my business. How I make the people in front of my cameras look (and yes, I frequently use Photoshop to soften laugh lines, brighten smiles, discreetly slim belly bulges, and so on) is none of anyone's beeswax; it's between me, my clients, and those models.

The wannabe busybodies can make their images look they way they want and I'll make my images look the way I want. Then we'll let the marketplace sort out which photos consumers prefer. Fair enough?

To be sure, yeah, those 'shopped Ralph Lauren models look horrifyingly freakish to me; and in trying to belatedly suppress the images with stupid legal threats, the company sure didn't do itself any favors. The dreadful, what-were-they-thinking Photoshop work in question rightly reaped a firestorm of criticism, causing RL to apologize and (a)mend its ways. That's the way we take care of things in a grown-up democratic society — not by slapping mandatory warning labels and wholesale prohibitions on some of the things we don't happen to like.

Imagine, in a few short years: If I want to publish a photo that I took — hang it in a local gallery, put it in an ad, share it on Flickr — and I've used Photoshop's cloning tool or healing brush, I'll be forced to destroy the visual integrity of my image with a mandatory warning label, roughly as attractive as a bar code and possibly a whole lot bigger. If I disobey, my business may be fined out of existence.

That's nuts. And wrong.

I won't stand for anyone doing that to me, my images, my vision, my style, my business, or my clients.

And for what? To protect women from "developing an unrealistic self-image"? (Does anyone else see how sexist that notion is on its face — as if women are too weak-willed and lame-brained to be trusted with glamour photos that may shatter their delicate Victorian sense of selves?) Or is the goal to promote truth in advertising? In either case, then we should also ban or regulate, just for starters, push-up bras, breast implants, artificial eyelashes, botox, and lip gloss.

It follows that, if "reality" is the goal, or the only reasonable benchmark, we should require people to walk around with text stenciled on their foreheads saying they've had lipo, they still suck in their stomach at parties, and they've shaved their armpits. After all, those things are not what nature intended. They promote unrealistic body images, and, being augmented reality, are carried out to deceive.

Cosmetics are merely "hope in a jar"; Photoshop, on the other hand, offers guaranteed results. How is that a bad thing? I wonder how many people wouldn't like to look a little younger, a little trimmer, when they have their photo taken. In fact, I'd wager that rather a lot of the very same men and women who profess to abhor "photochopping" would, if given the option, prefer to look at a photo of themselves in which they're five pounds lighter, and in which they have mild laugh lines instead of deep crow's feet — "reality" be damned. They demand that other people's pictures be unretouched; I suspect they'd like their own portrait to be the sole exception.

I recently attempted to test this theory in a discussion on an online forum. To the local feminist who publicly excoriated fashion photography and Photoshop artifice, I extended this (I thought) rather generous offer:

I invite you to have your photo taken by me. After I'm done brightening eyes, smoothing skin, and so on [in Photoshop], you get to pick either the high-resolution before or after version to display to the world (Facebook/Flickr/YouTube et cetera). When would you like to schedule your free session?

I never heard from her again.

The effectiveness of any of the augmented-reality methods I mentioned above (Photoshopping included), and the degree to which they convince people that there's no choice but to copy that look in real life, depends entirely on the gullibility of the beholder. The answer to the problem, then, is not "Make more laws." The answer is not "Let's have a Photoshop / fashion police." The answer is "Stop being such an impressionable dimwit."

I'm genuinely happy about this YouTube video (below), which I recently watched twice with my seven-year-old daughter (who is anything but a dimwit but still plenty impressionable). It's a great discussion piece and we had a nice talk about it, one we'll repeat as necessary:

It seems to me that, as usual, education is a thousand times better than legislation.

This whole debate is ultimately about personal freedom — the freedom to pursue the image you can see in your head, whether you're a photographer or someone dolling herself up for a date.

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UPDATE, Wednesday evening: Cohen published a followup today that's even more gobsmacking.

By his own explicit if belated admission, a warning label would have no effect; after all, to his opponents' idea that surely we may expect a bit of critical, independent thought from the would-be victims, he replies

[This] erroneously assumes that simply knowing that an image is falsified immunizes you from its effect.

Interesting, no? So he's saying, labels won't help; and women can't be counted on to arm themselves with a modicum of skepticism. It seems that banning 'shopped images is the only solution Cohen is left with.

I remember an era when the Times was on the first line of defense against First-Amendment attacks.

Comments

[Mike]

Did Ralph Lauren amend thier ways? There was another image posted recently: http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2009/10/ralph-lauren-hits-keep-on-coming.html

I would tend to agree with you though, but I do believe certain photoshopped images should draw lawsuits from some false advertizing claim.

Ex. This kiddie pool:
http://aroundanderson.com/?p=1340

[Phelps]

So what do we count as "photoshopping"? Color correction to account for a blue cast from sunlight? If that's the standard, then do we lock all the cameras on auto-white balance so no one can manipulate the color temp of the photo?

Is cropping out? Hell, every tool in PS has an analogy in the real world film darkroom. This is ignorance. And the worst crimes by legislators are laws passed in ignorance.

[Aaron Kinney]

This essay is made of awesome and win. I want to let you know, that if this law actually gets passed, I will intentionally and repeatedly violate it with wanton abandon.

[Jozef]

I'm using Gimp, not Photoshop, but that doesn't make any difference for such law. I'm not even going as far as to alter the elements in the image; maybe a little color correction, but mainly a lot of clone tool to edit out dust introduced to the images when scanning the slides. If I had to re-scan all the slides again (at roughly 20 minutes per slide), I'd shove a copy of Photoshop (still in the box) up the ass of everybody who voted for such a bill.

[hermesten]

You remember when the Times was first line of defense against 1st amendment attacks? If you're serious then I think you've been implanted with false memories.

I think I'm older than you and I can't remember a time when the NYT has been anything but a Gatekeeper for the established order. And the notion that any kind of "ethicist" would have a voice at the NYT is risible. Surely you've heard of Judith Miller? Ethicists and agitprop --surely you jest?

Cohen is a court fluffer for the ruling class, and a gatekeeper. All the real self-respecting journalists are either blogging or working for The Onion or Comedy Central. All the big city newspaper media whores are fluffers and gatekeepers for their State and Corporate Masters.

[Rogier]

No, I've never heard of Judith Miller. Who she? Oh, wait....THIS Judith Miller?
http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2006/11/judith_miller_h.html