Pit-falls of photography: Photoshopping images of celebs not new

The farcical controversy of Priyanka Chopra’s armpit has been doing the rounds of the Internet for a few days now. The actress’ seamless armpit on the cover of Maxim got more attention than was probably intended.

Though she took the storm with a pinch of salt and posted a “pit-stopping” photo of herself with no filter, it makes one wonder what all the fuss was about, as using Photoshop or other image editing software is an old trend in the fashion and film industries.    

“Photoshop now lets one do what we used to do in the darkroom before. So when people accepted that, why don’t they accept this?” asks photographer Arvind Chenji. “But some photographs are morphed so much that people don’t look like people. They look like dolls. I don’t subscribe to that,” he reasons.   

Fashion photographer Aquin Mathews says that it is indeed a regular practice in the industry. “Even when I shoot and give the photos to clients, they ask for retouches. But the reason why this particular photo got so much attention is because it was a job badly done. It doesn’t even look natural. A person like Priyanka, a very beautiful lady, already looks so perfect. They didn’t need to alter it so much,” he says.

He agrees with Arvind Chenji that the practice has been there for long. “Someone I know who used to work with the United Nations, went to cover an event at which Audrey Hepburn was present. She was surprised to see the actress in such plain demeanour. When my friend approached her about it, she said that that was how she really looked and that a lot of things went on behind the scenes in movies that made her look the way she did on screen.”

These instances are not alien to us Indians either. The otherwise flawless looking Kareena Kapoor didn’t look quite like herself (as we know her on screen) when she visited Hyderabad for the promotions of her film Ki & Ka. Her exposed, plump arms raised a few questions as to how they looked so different on screen.
“There is a limit to accepting something”, says Arvind about the extent to which an image can be manipulated.

Hollywood actress Kerry Washington had mirrored this opinion earlier this month, when she called out Adweek magazine for the heavy Photoshopping that had been done on her photographs. She had expressed sadness saying that it was unfortunate that she looked so different in the picture than what she looked like in the mirror.  

Photographer Nalli Ravi, though, does not think that the practice is very common. “Manipulation of an image is not required all the time unless the idea behind it is something fictional. Fashion photography is not fiction. It is straight imagery; we are photographing real people. So altering pictures is not really required,” he says.