Today on Salon.com there was an interesting article on a particularly American fetish of retouching children's photographs. The process is something like this: take an ordinary child and transform him - or more usually her - into a hideous, plastic doll. Take a look:
(All images taken from http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retoucha.html)
This is exactly what interests me about photography. Our ideal use of the photograph is not to represent 'truth', but to represent what we want to believe, or what others want us to believe.
The photograph is one of the most powerful ideological tools because it allows us to present an image (an idea, a dream, an instruction) as an apparent, unquestionable truth.
Of course the images above are obvious examples. But what is interesting is that this process takes place in all photography, from the most innocuous family photo to the fashion shoot to official government portraits. Even supposedly unbiased journalistic photography presents one person's view of another person's world, showing us 'what it is like'.
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