Inside an old warehouse in New York is a man who can make any woman beautiful.
Sculpted cheekbones, slimmer waist, bigger bust or more smouldering eyes —
Pascal Dangin can deliver them all.
Dangin is the master magician of “retouching” images by computer manipulation.
He is sought out by top photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Stephen
Meisel and by film stars and models who seek perfection — or at least the
impression of perfection.
In Dangin’s world nothing is quite what it seems. Last week he let slip in a
rare interview that he had tinkered with the Dove cosmetics campaign
featuring “real women”. Speaking to The New Yorker magazine, he was quoted
as saying: “It was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and
faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”
Glossy magazines and advertising campaigns have long relied on the retoucher’s
skill and Dangin manipulates countless images for international editions of
Vogue magazine. In the March issue of US Vogue alone, he digitally tweaked
107 advertisements, 36 fashion pictures and the cover image of Drew
Barrymore.
However, the Dove case was different: the claim that he had applied his skills
to a campaign whose very existence challenged the principles of retouching
stirred controversy — as well as a denial from the company itself.
Dangin, said the company, had worked only on another of its campaigns, “Dove
pro-age”, helping merely with the “removal of dust from the film and minor
colour correction”.
It added: “Dove strives to portray women by accurately depicting their shape,
size, skin colour and age.”
Nevertheless, the spat brought home the opposite point: these days almost
everything goes under the digital knife and so skilful are retouchers such
as Dangin that you will never see the scars.
Even Elizabeth Hurley, who recently revealed that she retouches her own
holiday snaps, expressed astonishment at how widespread and comprehensive
the practice has become. “The manipulation you can do,” she said, “you can
completely restructure a person.”
Although artists of Dangin’s calibre are prized for their subtlety, there are
now almost no limits on what they can do thanks to the power of the latest
technology.
Computers can banish wrinkles, slim down limbs and paint on make-up; they can
plump up breasts, add volume to hair, fatten hips and enhance cleavage; they
can remove cigarettes, tattoos or other items deemed unsuitable. They can
even splice together facial features from separate images of the same person
to create an ideal end product.
According to Dangin, the only public figure whose image tends not to be
manipulated is the Queen.
Critics say that idealised images created by computers make for impossible
role models. But if we know that every image is manipulated, does it matter?
Are we not able to distinguish dream from reality?
Image manipulation has always gone on: in classical times, statues of emperors
were created along ideal lines rather than any kind of verisimilitude. A
bust of Julius Caesar found in the Rhône this week was unusual in that it
portrayed the ageing military commander’s wrinkles. Almost as soon as
photography began, practitioners began manipulating prints.
The computer, argue some, has merely made the retoucher’s art more
sophisticated. Dangin recently demonstrated this with a photograph of a
famous actress standing on a skyscraper.
First he shuffled the buildings behind her into a more pleasing arrangement
and made the yellowy sky whiter. Then he fluffed out her dress with a
“warping” tool.
He softened her collarbones, then thought that she looked a bit too retouched
and made them bonier again.
He carefully left her crooked bottom row of teeth alone. “Her face is too high
and elongated,” he said. “But I don’t want her to become someone else.”
Dangin has been known to work for days trying to turn grass into the “most
expressive” shade of green and cannot bear misaligned windows. Untruthful?
Misleading?
“Humans have long colluded in an ideal of beauty,” said Sally Brampton, the
writer and former editor of Elle. Her first job was on Vogue in 1978 where
she worked alongside two people dedicated solely to airbrushing images. “I
am sure Helen of Troy was not that beautiful; we just buy into a collective
ideal. Retouching is neither good nor bad: it is clearly something we want
and until we decide we don’t want it, it will remain that way.”
So Kate Winslet’s legs are lengthened, Penelope Cruz’s eyelashes are
thickened and Mariah Carey expresses an unashamed love of Photoshopping.
“Although you know it’s cheating, it’s gorgeous [to have it done],” admitted
Tamara Beckwith, the party girl. “I did a job with Davina McCall to promote
something and we both needed to wear white Wonderbras. She’s quite busty and
I’m not.
“But when I had a look at the pictures, suddenly I had this gorgeous cleavage.
You want more and more.”
Beckwith, however, is also wary of the influence on others. “Young people who
don’t have a clue about the fashion world may not understand,” she said.
“You can’t sit there and pretend it’s all good.”
Indeed, the British Fashion Council was recently moved to warn magazine
editors not to let retouching run out of control. Rosie Boycott, the former
magazine and newspaper editor, goes further. “I don’t agree with retouching,
although I can see why it happens,” she said. “I think it’s fair enough when
it comes to [removing] blemishes, but it gives people unattainable ideas of
beauty.
“I don’t like the whole way a star is presented to you: the package, the
control.
It’s just become an exercise in PR; retouching happens all the way through.”
Juergen Teller, the photographer, who is renowned for not retouching his
pictures, said: “I don’t see a need for it; it’s not what I find beautiful.
Sometimes I am astonished. Beauty advertisers change everything and it
doesn’t do any good for the psyche of a woman.”
On occasion retouching can deceive even celebrities as well as the public.
There was uproar when a magazine digitally removed Kylie Minogue’s knickers
for one of its covers and Cat Deeley was horrified when she posed for a
photo shoot only to discover later that most of her clothes had been erased.
Photography and fashion industry leaders claim that today’s audiences are
sophisticated enough to know the score and understand that they are buying a
dream, not reality.
“A certain amount of retouching has always been a part of not only glossy
magazines but all glamorous and celebrity- oriented material,” said
Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue. “We are not in the business of
portraying reality all the time and people buy magazines like Vogue in order
to look at a kind of perfection.
“They are sophisticated enough to know that what they are seeing is a
construct. Nowadays people retouch their own snaps on the computer before
posting them on Facebook.”
Jeremy Langmead, editor of Esquire magazine, agreed. “Why shouldn’t you look
better? We strive to improve things in other areas of life, so if you have
the technology it makes sense,” he said. “If you don’t like retouching you
should also be against make- up. And if you want to know what real people
look like, you can look out of the window.”
An all-too-stark reality check is also available in magazines such as Heat
that specialise in photographs of stars caught unawares. Cellulite, lumpy
clothes and pasty faces are all on display among Hollywood actors and
models. Some publications even use digital trickery to emphasise these
blemishes.
“We know it’s not real, don’t we,” said Brampton. “My 16-year-old
daughter accepts that the pictures are fake. She’ll measure herself up to it
but not in a damaging way. We fret about teenagers, but they are quite
robust and cynical.”
The art of digital manipulation has even come to be regarded with a humorous
vanity. That was the reaction of Rachel Johnson, the writer, who was
recently photographed for Tatler. “I was very cross,” she said. “I wasn’t
retouched! I specifically said, ‘I hope you’re going to do lots of
retouching’, but I opened up the magazine and it was warts and all. Yellow
teeth, red eyes and thunder thighs. I looked worse than Henry Conway, who
was in the same issue.”
Retouching is not always aimed at making women thinner. Fashion insiders say
editors often ask for pictures of models to be bulked up, rather than
slimmed down, especially if a model has lost weight in between being
selected for a shoot and working on the studio session. With thousands of
pounds riding on a shoot, boney ankles are not allowed to get in the way of
perfection.
As long as we know that we are operating in a Matrix-like parallel universe,
the industry argues, retouching does no harm. Dangin said: “I look at life
as retouching. Make-up and clothes are just an accessorisation of your being
— they are just a transformation of what you want to look like.”
