‘Hey you, you reading this—are you tired of ennui? I’m sure you want the perfect body? Have you ever considered going under the digital scalpel? Your body needs it, seriously, your disappointingly inadequate, ugly body is in need of Photoshop!’, says 21st century society. Today’s revolutionary technology in the advertising and media world, blended with the fusion of modern beauty standards, desire and social pressure, blares this provocative message, a message that universally screams from the average fashion magazine ad and advertising billboard poster. Whether it is through social media, the internet, television or magazines, the inadequacy of one’s appearance is fuelled by skinny models or muscular bodybuilders with ‘aesthetics’ written all over their ‘Photoshopped’ bodies. Re-touched imagery has distorted the ideal human form into something unreachable, something fake. These doctored images splashed on countless magazine covers, internet ads and product labels compel us to conform to that which modern society has now modelled as ‘beautiful’. It is fair to say that contemporary society places a high priority on appearance.1 Through the constant exposure and the ensuing acceptance of retouched images of bodies, people are manipulated to believe that a certain body image is ‘perfect’. This normalisation of artificial beauty creates an impossible ideal for people to aspire to, resulting in body-dissatisfaction, depression, insecurity, stress and lowered self-esteem.2 In 2011, an estimate of 43,000 men and women in the United Kingdom underwent cosmetic surgery, an indication of societal pressures to look slim.3 The increasing prevalence of serious health complications, such as bulimia and anorexia, is in a major part due to the endorsement of the ‘perfect’ body image.4 Given that photography is so central to the tensions that this culture... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Andrzej Dragan, Marta (1/6), 2006
Anna Utopia Giordano, Botticelli, The Birth of Venus from Giordano’s The Venus Project, 2012.
