the shop rules

As a photo student who shoots a fair amount in digital and is required to take classes in digital processing, I have a fair amount of knowledge of photoshop and retouching. I'm also a feminist, a fat acceptance activist, and someone who thinks that photoshop is mostly an extremely overused tool. So when I'm doing my work on computers, I spend a lot of time thinking about the ethics of retouching. What is ok? What is pushing it? What am I comfortable retouching on models? It's a big question for me, something I do contemplate a lot. But I've got rules that keep me feeling ok about the work I do. Of course it helps that most of my digital work lately is abstraction and I don't do much in terms of retouching it. But anyway, I've done some and I have rules for the cases when I need to retouch people.

1. Skin can be cleaned of dirt or pimples, sometimes cuts as well, particularly for headshots. Wrinkles, freckles, beauty spots, things like this, that are a natural part of the skin and a constant as to how the person looks, these are not retouched out. Skin should look real, like skin, not like some strange plastic thing.

2. Skin color cannot be dramatically changed. The only exceptions to this rule would be color retouching when my lighting causes skin to be a different color than it actually is and when there are issues with shine. Example: Photographs of a person of color come out with bright white shine due to light issues/skin oil/makeup issues. In this case, skin can be edited so there aren't strange white patches.

3. I do not slim models out. I will not do it. It is sleezy and cheap and if you want an ultra thin model, you should just get one instead. When I photograph people, I look at the shape of the human body. Using photoshop to alter these shapes seems to cheapen the work. It changes the content of the work and that's simply unacceptable. Besides, if perfection in form is what you are seeking out, perhaps you ought to stop photographing people.

4. Seriously, I'm not de-aging anyone. I have this thing, it's called integrity and essentially changing someone for anything short of a fine arts project (Example: folks I turned into demons for a project on a fairytale) is kind of way fucked up. And, editing people and presenting them as reality sends out some seriously fucked up signals about what folks can look like.


Really, it boils down to not promoting the hell out of the fucked up way women are taught to look at themselves. There's no shame in age, in wrinkles, in hairs, in fat, in freckles. And whatever you think about these things, I honestly don't care. This is my code of integrity. My work must be honest or nothing at all.