Sports Illustrated isn’t a magazine I ever read, nor for that matter is Jezebel, so thanks to
(Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography for drawing my attention to the feature in it,
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Goes to 7 Continents, Finds Exotic People to Use as Props, which made me both laugh and despair about the abuse it documents. Hard to believe that such pernicious and stereotypical nonsense gets published but it does reinforce the view of those interested in sports as retarded. If it wouldn’t be unfair to Neanderthals I might even employ that term. Seriously I thought stuff like this went out of use years ago, but perhaps I live in a sheltered environment.
It’s also evidence of some pretty poor Photoshop, and reminded me of another page of ‘
17 Mesmerizing Before & After Photoshop GIFs (and again I apologise in advance for exposing you to some poor taste puerile images of women) almost all of which I think qualify as Photoshop disasters. I don’t think there are any that actually improve the images, but most are beyond saving except by throwing a blanket over the model in the studio.
I’m not a prude, and would readily admit to enjoying looking at images of the nude human body and have written about them, but there is something unnatural about the whole of what is misleadingly given the name ‘glamour’. Come to that, much ‘erotic’ photography leaves me uninterested and certainly un-aroused, except occasionally to laughter at the more preposterous examples. It’s certainly hard to take the work of some of those well-known French photographers taking ‘photo de charme’ seriously event when their work sells for high prices in the art market.
Last week too I followed a link to some newly produced commercially available Lightroom pre-sets. More curious than anything about why anyone would want to buy pre-sets when you can set up your own for free – it’s one of the essential features of Lightroom and easy to do. It led me to a video part of which took a wholly healthy looking woman’s face and turned it into a decidedly unnatural glowing porcelain. I’ll spare you the link.