ENOUGH PHOTOSHOP! A FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER REBELS AGAINST THE DIGITAL RETOUCHING OF WOMEN'S BODIES

Adi Barkan is an Israeli photographer and modeling agent who for several years has been fighting against the cult of thinness on the catwalk and against a mystified presentation of reality. With the advent of digital, and the use and abuse of Photoshop for the world of fashion and advertising, magazine covers, billboards around the city, and many of the fashion images and stars of various kinds became they are filled with perfect, smooth faces, with lean bodies on the verge of survival, with smooth and pure surfaces, which, however desirable, do not exist in nature.

Now Adi Barkan relaunches his long battle with the Real / Unreal project, which would like to ban the use of Photoshop for images in advertising campaigns, because they present a distorted vision of reality, proposing a model of unattainable beauty. Through his agency, Adi Barkan is collecting and promoting those campaigns that do not make a distorted use of female aesthetics, that is, that do not resort to retouching, and refuses to use models with a BMI (Body Mass Index) below a certain value considered healthy. .

Before and after Photoshop, discover the most striking cases

The beauty treatment from Photoshop is obviously not only the responsibility of the models, as you can see in the images above. Even the cover stars often if not always "revised" through the digital image retouching program, and some of them have even opposed this treatment.

Emma Watson, the Hermione of Harry Potter and now an international star, once said at Sunday Times not to love photo editing, and to prefer the view of wrinkles, more convincing to tell a real woman. Keira Knightley, on the other hand, had protested against the production of the film King Arthur, who for the American poster of the film had increased her breasts by two sizes with Photoshop, while the actress proudly claimed her first poor one. In that case, the actress's lesson served: no one dared to increase her breasts anymore in the images of the posters of his subsequent films, nor retouch anything else.

Changing an image with Photoshop is very simple, and any workplace now uses it. The video below demonstrates it ...

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In a recent conference in the TED cycle, Barkan recounted an emblematic episode that happened to him firsthand: he was getting ready for a photo shoot, and in the make-up room a model asked him for a piece of the sandwich that the photographer had with him. Before she could do that, the model's agent railed at the girl: "How do you think of eating a sandwich now?" Thursday you have a casting! "Barkan still says he is shocked by the episode:" How can you tell someone who is already underweight not to eat? "

Since then, the photographer has decided to promote concrete actions to change things: in 2002 he promoted a bill later approved by the Israeli Parliament to protect models, according to which all fashion agencies must indicate, for their models, the "Body Mass Index, so that any brand is responsible for its choices, the type of body to promote and the model to use. An attempt that for now has not found imitators outside of Israel.

To find out more about the subject, discover all our articles on the image of the woman's body!

See also:
#ImNoAngel. The revenge of the curvy body in a campaign for underwear
Actresses and models: when the testimonial is curvy
Women, love your body! The photographic project that encourages you to appreciate yourself for who you are
Spoof! The parody on fashion and beauty that is causing discussion on the web. Discover all the images