Blemishes Wanted

Unedited photography promotes positive body image

STORY BY CARINA JIMINEZ

An episode of My Little Pony plays in the background as Rebecca Rivero tries to loosen up her nerves. She stands naked in her seventh floor Nash Hall dorm room as her friend points a camera toward her. Rivero is going to post photos of herself nude online to conceptualize a simple idea: She wants to know what people will think and say when they see these photos completely unedited.

Something silly happens in the My Little Pony episode and Rivero laughs: click. The photos are decidedly non-sexual and often close-up in order to focus on the detail of her skin, her body’s surface. The photos acknowledge her stretch marks, pimples and rolls of skin.

“[I wanted] to show off that I’m a person,” Rivero says. “I’m not a flawless individual. There are stories on my body.”

With a bank of windows facing Bellingham Bay and a white comforter on her bed as her set-up, Rivero tries to pose in positions that show off her body without revealing her breasts or genitalia.

A few weeks after placing the nude photos online in April 2012, Rivero received so much positive feedback and support that she began Middle Women, an organization that provides a safe space that encourages self-esteem and positive body image.

“Because of the lack of media literacy in our culture right now, I really think that a lot of the time people are looking at Photoshopped images and judging themselves as if they were looking at somebody right in front of them,” Rivero says.

Beauty standards have been pushed to the point that not even models are able to achieve the image of perfection that photo editors create. Edited photos aren’t just about making people look thinner, they’re about removing any kind of “flaw” to achieve a level of human perfection no one has seen, according to Alexandra Shulman, Editor of Vogue United Kingdom. The photos create an artificial world where no one has wrinkles, eye bags, pores or even veins, Shulman explains.

No one can achieve it, but an entire nation is trying to emulate it.

“What’s scary now is that people don’t always know what they’re looking at,” Rivero says.

Perceived Flaws

Photoshop was released for the first time in 1990, leading to image manipulation as a common practice.

“On one hand there are the images that are so drastically Photoshopped you can’t help but laugh at them,” says Emily Hanna, assistant director of the Women’s Center at Western. “But what I think people don’t see are insidiously altered images.”

Friends and residents from Nash Hall gathered for Rivero’s second photo shoot the following month. The point was to take beautiful photos emulating those seen in media, but to not alter the models in any way in order to show people that a beautiful photo of a necklace can still reveal the reality of the model, Rivero says.

When looking at images in media, Rivero explains that the point of the photo is to sell a product, and therefore the model is no longer the focus. The agenda of focusing entirely on the product has led models to lose their genuine reality.

“I think a lot of the time [editing models] is intentional, especially if it’s advertising because they’re glorified mannequins at this point,” Rivero says. “You don’t really notice anything about their humanity.”

DigitalRetouch, Inc. — a New York-based company that specializes in celebrity, fashion and beauty digital retouching — states in its website’s about section that it prides itself in its ability to provide “nip and tuck” edits that appear natural and un-retouched. The goal is to make edits to images without leaving behind evidence of their “transformations.”

Research suggests that advertisers have been normalizing unrealistically perfect individuals in order to create an unattainable desire that drives product consumption, according to Paul Hamburg, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

“[Edited photos] are driven by industries that are invested in us feeling bad about ourselves,” says Helen Morgan Parmett, assistant professor of communications at Western. “We are constantly needing to consume items in order to achieve levels of perfection that are ultimately impossible.”

Middle Women challenges the idea of removing a person’s perceived flaws by releasing photos maintaining a person’s real image.

“We’re really trying to give the humanity back to the individuals who participate in those shoots,” Rivero says. “How often do you think a Vogue model ever gets any say in how her body is edited?”

Reactions to the unedited photos have been varied but encouraging, Rivero says. Often viewers don’t notice a photo is unedited until after they’ve shared it and found it aesthetically pleasing.

The idea of not pointing out that photos are unedited and simply allowing people to get comfortable with unedited photography has been a popular theme among positive body image missions.

U-la-la.com, a college-based blog for women founded in 2010, wants unedited photography of women to become the status quo. With time and more access to resources, U-la-la hopes to have a more inclusive representation of women by including ethnic women, trans-women, women with body modifications and so on.

“To us that’s how it should be,” co-founder Molly Longest says. “We should just have examples of real girls.”

What’s beauty to you?

For photographers who are taking these images, there is a close connection between the beauty standard and inclusive representation.

“It’s really a fine line for me — what I find aesthetically pleasing and conceptually driven and then what everyone else does,” says Annmarie Kent, a Western senior and fine art photography major. “A lot of the models I use, male or female, I find very attractive.”

Kent explains that people often perpetuate their beauty standards onto everything they see. For example, when examining a photo with one model she finds physically appealing and one she doesn’t, the model plays a huge role in why she liked one photo and not the other — regardless of the same background and set-up.

Regardless of Kent’s choice in models, she is unsure whether the decision to edit photography to display the current beauty standard is a conscious one or not for other photographers and editors.

“[Photo editors] might enjoy that aesthetic,” Kent says. “Maybe they also have the ideal that this is the right body.”

Parmett understands how some people may find certain images in media aesthetically pleasing. As a critical media literacy researcher, Parmett explains that over time people become primed to desire those images and the people in them.

People have the ability to counter the initial reactions toward and effects of those images if given the proper critical tools. However, the education system currently focuses on teaching students how to use media, rather than understand it, Parmett explains.

College may well be one of the first places a person learns critical tools for understanding media, but Parmett believes college is late in the game to be learning.

Rivero says she never had formal training in media literacy, but describes herself as having “media street smarts.” She simply knew that being exposed to images of unrealistic people everyday would affect how people see themselves, she says.

“We’re starting to realize that a person’s appearance does not have to say anything about their value,” Hanna says.

With organizations such as Middle Women and U-la-la.com changing the platform to display unedited photography, the future of media literacy looks positive.