I studied photography for 4 years in high school, so I was particularly interested in Tanya Sheenan’s discussion of Photoshop as a cultural tool and manipulation. In fine art photography, Photoshop is used mostly within the first context of editing that Sheenan talked about: to adjust technical issues with the original photo and to correct color, white balance, exposure, and other problems with the photo, as opposed to its subject. However,\u00a0even non-portrait photography uses some aesthetic retouching to manipulate the content of the image. For example, I have erased\u00a0telephone wires out of an architectural photo, or painted in grass over patchy lawns. Although these edits do not have the same cultural impacts that slimming a model’s thighs or reducing acne would have, they do contribute to the conception\u00a0of photography as an unattainable ideal view of life. It is this idea that has fed into a recent controversy over the unrealistic nature of social media sites like instagram. After Instagram “star” Essena O’Neil “quit” instagram in an attempt to show how fake her digital self was, multiple news outlets have criticized Instagram and social media in general for showing an edited “highlight reel” version of life (http:\/\/www.today.com\/news\/instagram-star-quits-social-media-reveals-her-dream-life-was-t53721). Although this kind of\u00a0editing is different from photoshopped models in some ways, it is similar in that it creates a distorted vision of normalcy that real, unfiltered people could never achieve every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I studied photography for 4 years in high school, so I was particularly interested in Tanya Sheenan’s discussion of Photoshop as a cultural tool and manipulation. In fine art photography, Photoshop is used mostly within the first context of editing… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6658,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[250950],"tags":[148685,12425,619,258925],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6658"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":956,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}