2017: the year the world said NO to Photoshop

As models, celebrities and indignant consumers at large are more and more frequently contesting unrealistic beauty standards, the ethics of Photoshop are becoming increasingly fraught.

Ten years ago, magazines virtually had free rein to eradicate stretch marks, elongate legs and lighten or darken skin tones at their discretion, before unveiling their finished products.

But 2017 has been a year of unprecedented activism around issues of illusion, influence and misrepresentation. Both celebrities and the woman on the street have make the link between photo-editing and racism, fat phobia, ableism and the censorship of difference in general. 

One of the more high-profile Photoshop-related scandals erupted in November, when actress Lupita Nyong’o took to social media to upbraid Grazia UK magazine for editing out her afro on its cover.

The magazine elected to show her artificially smooth-headed and short-haired, erasing the reality of the hair she has, by her own admission, taken so long to love.

“As I have made clear so often in the past with every fiber of my being, I embrace my natural heritage and despite having grown up thinking light skin and straight, silky hair were the standards of beauty, I now know that my dark skin and and kinky, coily hair are beautiful too,” the actress asserted in a powerful Instagram post.

She went on to describe her disappointment on discovering that Grazia UK “edited out and smoothed my hair to fit their notion of what beautiful hair looks like”. 

The reality is that what magazines choose to show – and what they choose to disguise –has far-reaching implications, which exceed the initial visual impact of the image in question. In erasing her afro, Grazia UK unthinkingly implied that Nyongo’s natural hair – and the natural hair of other black women, by extension – is incompatible with beauty.

Likewise, when magazines and advertisements remove scars and stretch marks from the bodies of their models, they effectively label them shameful, ugly and unworthy of recognition.

By and large, though, the strongest negative reactions arise from images that are altered to make models appear thinner. The problem with this kind of misrepresentation is obvious, in a world rife with fat phobia and disordered eating; and a barrage of celebrities have been outspoken in their rejection of the thinner, taller versions of themselves that appear on newsstands. 

The fact that women in particular are no longer prepared to tolerate this kind of effacement is evinced by the changes underway in the realms of fashion and advertising.

British label ASOS and American brands Target and Lane Bryant were applauded for using unedited images in swimwear campaigns this year.

Meanwhile renowned stock photo agency Getty Images has been implementing changes behind the scenes to restore the authenticity of the women it represents as “stock”.

Ten years ago, the most popular image of a “woman” on Getty was a half-naked, clear-skinned woman under a towel. In 2017, it’s a full-length shot of a woman decked out in hiking gear and scaling a mountain.

From passive to active; from generic to distinct; from stereotypical to atypical – the ways in which we think about representation, and about the consequences of Photoshop, are changing.