In this year's class, we discussed many topics that pertain to photography and how it changes the world we live in. Photography has a huge impact on our every day lives weather we notice it or not. It changes the way we see things, the way we understand things, and the way we feel about things. Photography is so powerful in today's society and I learned that it can be used to benefit as well as hurt society. I hadn't given much thought to how photographers edit and change a photograph so as we discussed this in class, I was really interested in hearing other opinions and learning more about it.
Towards the end of the semester, we started covering the use of photoshop and editing in photography. We watched videos and short clips, interviews and movies, all about media, propaganda, images, and advertising. I realized that images surround us every day and have tremendous effects on how we think, feel, and act. I knew that photography was used for advertising, but I never really thought about how the media uses photos, manipulates and changes photos, to persuade us into buying a product or looking a certain way.
Now, whenever I see ads in magazines or in stores, I wonder to myself how long they spent on retouching and reshaping the model. I wonder how long it took to airbrush the models skin and make her eyes and lips bigger and chisel her cheekbones. I think about what the picture might have originally looked like, then think to myself, how do I even know if this picture is real or not? It's really quite frustrating, but when it comes down to it, I can't say that editting photos is wrong because I do it myself. I edit color contrast, brighten/darken, even crop photos of my own, but where do we draw the line? I don't know weather or not enhancing colors in a photo is as bad as moving two pyramids closer together for a magazine cover.
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