Magazine Article of the Year
The year isn’t half over, but this brilliant profile — by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker, about a photo-retoucher you’ve never heard of — gets my vote.
I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he [Dangin] asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”
May 9th, 2008 at 7:31 am
[…] (Hat tip to Seth Roberts for bringing my attention to the profile.) […]
May 13th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I assume you’ve noticed by now that the quotation you included in your post turned out to be inaccurate — Dangin didn’t work on Dove’s “Real Women” campaign featuring “lumpier-than-usual women in their undergarments” that the journalist appears to mention, and wasn’t talking about that one either. Instead, he worked on the “Pro-Age” photos by Anne Leibovitz, which featured older (50+), mostly thin, and *naked* women. And according to both Dangin and Leibovitz, he did dust removal and color correction, not heavy retouching.
(Not sure if they ever used those photos in the US; too much skin, I guess…)
(And yes, the New Yorker has confirmed this, even if their arrogance forbids them to actually admit that they didn’t bother to fact-check their own article, and instead claims that one inaccurate word (”undergarments”) in a 6,308 word article isn’t that bad.)
May 13th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Observer, no I hadn’t noticed this. Thanks for pointing it out. My take is that Collins accurately reported what Dangin unwisely (but accurately) said. I’ll believe Dove, Dangin, and Leibowitz when they release the originals . . . which they haven’t. Rather than say the quotation “turned out to be inaccurate” I’d say it turned out to be embarrassing.