Slashdot Mirror
French Deputies Want Labels On Photo-Altered Models
Psychophrenes writes "A number of French deputies are proposing to pass a law requiring all published photos that were modified by means of an image manipulation program to include a statement indicating that 'the photo was altered in order to modify the appearance of a person.' This indication is to be mandatory on all ads, packaging images, political posters and even art photos, and is considered a matter of public health, aimed at fighting anorexia." The related article is in French, but Google Translate does a pretty good job.
It might be a little annoying reading a porn magazine which has the text "'the photo was altered in order to modify the appearance of a person." thrown all over it.
But does this apply to persons only? I hope we'd finally get to know the truth about McDonalds hamburgers. Or can we count them as persons?
Isn't the very act of scanning and printing using a computer a digital modification?
What if the camera's software tweaked the lighting or white-balance as the picture was being taken?
If all photographs are labeled, then the label becomes meaningless.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But does this apply to persons only? I hope we'd finally get to know the truth about McDonalds hamburgers. Or can we count them as persons?
Well, maybe they were at one time...
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Why not make it mandatory to label surgically altered models also? I want to know the boobies I look at are all natural.
Two all-beef Patties, Special Scott and Lester Cheese picking bunions on a Sesame Street Bus?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You mean removing the antlers?
We knew that.
He doesn't mind that, its the airbrushing out of her penis that bothers him.
men's magazines are full of pictures of... women
women's magazines are full of pictures of... women
except the women in men's magazines are usually well-proportioned in the t&a department
meanwhile, the women in women's magazines are pure heroin chic: ribs showing, no curves. yuck
i really don't know why, but for some reason the female standard of feminine beauty (as opposed to the male standard of feminine beauty) is starvation porn. women for some reason or another think the ideal female form is that of a prebuscent boy
as for the magazine industry "creating" or "feeding" this phenomenon: no, if it didn't appeal to women on some level, the magazine wouldn't sell. media and consumer exist in co-dependency. media follows what its audience wants, for obvious reasons: $. (as an aside, this simple truth should dispel the whole idea of media-created trends on a whole number of other issues that some people believe: its the audience, not the media, stop blaming the media)
if you want to know what men want and like in the female form, it is well-established fact, biological fact, not cultural, that men prefer women who are heck of a lot more well-fed than what women see as an ideal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
the whole scary skinny trend in high fashion is created by, and perpetuated by, and invested in, by women, not men. yes, there are few strange men who actually prefer their women to be unfeminine stick figures, but these men are not the norm
so girls, listen up, from the male perspective of beauty: go fix yourself a sammich. its your fellow women that want you to waste away, and on some archaic level we don't understand, its your own strange female mind that wants you to be so skinny, not us men
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You sound like a programmer who is completely ignorant of how legal systems work.
Laws aren't written like "if photo.is_manipulated() then display_disclaimer() end". They actually use words and sentences to express the intent of the law in a reasonable way. Cropping will not be considered manipulation; airbrushing will. Furthermore, even "gray area" can be part of law, thanks to an amazing technology called "courts."
Basically, your objections are complete nonsense.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
As a graphic designer, allow me to simplify things - EVERY image published has been altered with photo manipulation software. Whether it's as minimal as colour adjustment or removing some insignificant blemishes from the image to outright "enhancing" of the image. EVERY image has been manipulated. Trust me.
Right-on, France!
I don't know if such a law can even work, but just the fact that this kind of thing is even being considered is really cool.
My fellow male geeks don't truly get what girls go through and what a mind-job it does on them. But there IS one example which might resonate. . .
Remember when all those new Star Wars toys came out, and all the characters you once identified with were now PuMpEd up? I know it affected me in a negative way, and I thought I was fairly impervious to such things. I found it surprising and illuminating.
Advertising and media stereotypes fuck you in the head. Remember: Body hair was at one time not considered ugly on a woman. It wasn't until quite recently that this changed when a razor-blade company decided to start equating dirtiness with body-hair on women. Doubled the number of customers for its product. This was only a century or two ago.
Fuck advertising. Rock-on France! If it wasn't for Sarkozy and the creep of evil, France would be the true hero of the world.
-FL
Actually in Australia for many years Playboy and Penthouse published nude photos with women's genitals airbrushed smooth to look like a Barbie doll. That created a generation of women that think something is wrong with them and that they should have bits cut off.
Seems like the longer our democracies go on, the more bureaucratic and insane they start becoming. This isn't "fascism," this isn't the will of the people being usurped, this is the system working as it should, and these are the results.
It seems to me that democracy results in a sort of populistic legalism where you have thousands and thousands of little laws trying to create the perfect existence. But you can't make a perfect existence by putting strings on everyone and letting everyone else play everyone else's puppet master. Nobody can know even a fraction of the laws, yet break one that gets enforced and you're fined or jailed or forced into temporary involuntary servitude. Democracy may be freedom of the masses, but it's not freedom of the individual. The machine may be free to operate but the cogs are not free to turn. Is that really how you envision a free society?
And once we start trying to plug every possible hole that could cause mental illness or otherwise undesirable behavior we become an even more nightmarish version of Brave New World, where instead of people being conditioned by birth the governments ("the people") try to heavily restrict and control all social influences because of the undesirability of emotional problems in society, the end result being an overall loss of individual autonomy and in particular freedom of speech.
not Photoshop. As long as fashion models have to be under normal weight to be accepted for the top fashion shows and magazines, young girls will follow this role model and that is the real problem, not photoshopping bad skin. If you type "anorexic models" into any search engine you find a lot of gruesome stories about girls who literally starved themselves to death on the job. Alternatively: force yourself to watch "Fashion TV" for an hour. That's not a new problem ("Twiggy" turned 60 last week, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twiggy) and not one likely to be changed by any law.
1) This two-dimenstional photo is an alteration of the model depicted. The actual model exists in three dimensions and has volume, unlike this photo. Do not attempt to reduce your volume to zero, as it might affect your health.
2) The photo of this model is only 7 inches tall. The actual model is over 5 feet tall. Do not attempt to reduce your height to only 7 inches, as it might affect your health."
Erik Paulsen made a attack ad where he darkened the skin of Ashwin Madia, apparently to make sure nobody mistook him for a white person.
As a photojournalist, I think it would be interesting to see just how many photos in fashion magazines are airbrushed or otherwise manipulated after the fact. In terms of ethics, I was taught and have come to believe that there are a few "ethical" manipulations -- cropping, limited use of burning and dodging, etc., that you can use while still maintaining the integrity of the original photo. But once you change what was actually there -- whether it's airbrushing the blemishes off a model's face or using the clone stamp tool to take a few pounds off her hips -- you've crossed into photomanipulation. And it's only fair for people to know when this is taking place, IMO.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
link to that Dove commercial.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
But does this apply to persons only? I hope we'd finally get to know the truth about McDonalds hamburgers. Or can we count them as persons?
Pictures of burgers are representative of the type of burger you can expect, you do not expect the exact burger that is in the photo otherwise they would have to take a lot of photos!
Good for the French anyway, this can only be a positive thing.
Food styling and photography is at least as complicated as fashion styling and photography. People at least do not dry up, wilt, sag, and turn funny colors over the course of an hour under the lights. Burgers are one of the harder foods to style and photograph. The burgers you see in photographs are not even edible. For some interesting tricks of the food stylist/photographer's trade, see here: http://www.choice.com.au/viewArticle.aspx?id=102996&catId=100406&tid=100008&p=1&title=Food+styling.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... since the anorexia epidemic is so much greater a problem than the obesity one.
In journalism, you are correct.
In art, advertisement, and entertainment, photographers are far less conservative.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's not clear that a porn magazine would be covered by this law, but adverts would be. We already have disclaimers in the UK for cosmetics adverts. They are actually quite informative. I saw one recently advertising some kind of shampoo and stating that it "enhanced vibrancy" and the models had ultra-bouncy curled hair, meanwhile the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen actually said something like "note: models did not use the advertised product. Models hair was formed by makeup expert." That kind of information makes a huge difference in how people perceive the advert. I've seen similar disclaimers for skin cream adverts, while the voiceover is saying how amazing the product is, the disclaimer says something like "In independent tests 28% of test subjects reported some improvement"; so now we know that 72% of test subjects reported no improvement with this product! I think the honesty in advertising laws are great, certainly a lot more amusing than the adverts we used to have a few years ago.
Most people have no idea how how much touching up goes on. In the documentary Bigger, Faster, Stronger a photographer from the "protein shake" market is interviewed. He states that he has actually done photoshoots of the "before" (weakling) and "after" (muscleman) photos in the same day. That's right, what the advertiser claims to be some amazing muscle growth effect is actually just photo manipulation. It's completely dishonest. Oh, and the models admit using steroids. They say that if people are stupid enough to actually believe the photos, then they deserve to lose their money. Given the choice between this blatant corruption, where the uneducated and trusting are lied to and exploited for financial gain, and a regulated market, I'll choose regulation.