Photoshop scandals

Never mind not believing a word you read, never believe the picture in front of you is real. Or at least undoctored. Pretty much every picture in a magazine will have been photoshopped. Sometimes just to readjust the contrast, or alter the levels of light - most often to smooth skin, take out an unsightly logo/cab/person standing in the background and sometimes flipped around entirely to fit the necessary space. Which is why I'm confused by this s0-claimed anti-photoshop crusade at the moment. Whilst I totally agree with the statement from photographer Peter Lindbergh - who has just made his own statement by photographing supermodels without make-up for French Elle - that 'heartless retouching should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century', a few bare-faced pictures do not a campaign make. A token three pages of People magazine's Top 100 Most Beautiful People in the World issue dedicated to Z-listers willing to be photographed wearing 'just moisturiser' cannot count as a revolution. Buy my personal favourite irony of fashion's whole fashionable anti-retouching movement? Conde Nast's new magazine, LOVE. Katie Grand might have picked Beth Ditto - yes, all 20 stone of her - as her coverstar and she might have written her entire editor's letter about not airbrushing one of her bulging curves out in the images. But she failed to remove the 'Retouching Studio's' credit from the masthead. Oopsie.