Body image and post-processing

This post is particularly personal/sensitive for me but my hopes are that in sharing my thought processes it may help me develop and possibly even inspire further ideas, so bear with me!

My thoughts on this were exaggerated when, after having my own internal body image battles recently, a random man on the internet told me I should be going to the gym. Rightly or wrongly, it really got to me and started off a whole load of thoughts that have been piling up recently related to the subject. It just so happens that yesterday was also the day I had planned to sit down and edit a bunch of self-portraits I recently took.

The first thing I've concluded (a day later) is "screw that guy"! My body belongs to me and any decisions I make to alter it will be entirely mine and not based on the comments of random people online. However, as a model, my job does require me to post a lot of images of myself into the public domain, and I do regularly receive feedback. Whilst there are a lot of positive comments out there (thank you!) for anyone wondering, I do also frequently receive (unwarranted) feedback on areas of my body and how to align them with other people’s ideals, such as: weight (eat more/less/exercise etc.), skin (tanning, body art, piercings, tattoos), bust (whether I ‘should’ get enhancements or not) and hair (pubic hair, leg hair, armpit hair and the hair on my head) - none of these are things that I have asked for criticism on.

Something that fascinates me about this (and social media in general), along with the fact that people think they have some kind of right to tell other humans how they should be changing their bodies in order to become a better ‘object’ of desire to others *rolls eyes*, is that people do frequently comment on how 'my body' looks (or how *I* look) rather than on the image as a technical piece or as an artistic creation. In some cases it is all the same (particularly if little 'editing' has been done), but sometimes an image gets manipulated in unrealistic ways, so what you are really commenting on is not "how amazing my body is" but actually "how amazing I would look if my body was an unrealistic, modified version of itself ".

(I feel now is an appropriate time to mention that a lot of comments I get are about how people love that my body is 'natural' - *it* is, but photographs posted online are often not).

I am not debating whether post-processing is "good" or "bad" (or even healthy/un-healthy) and I’m not saying people should stop commenting on images (or at least the nice people who know how to write an entire sentence) I’m just questioning if we actually realise what it is that we are commenting on and whether as a society we believe everything we see as a version of truth. I'm sure by now we all know that the majority of images we see online or in magazines have had some degree of 'post-processing' but whether that is minor adjustments such as an exposure increase or more drastic alterations such as complete body modification/manipulation is what I'm interested in looking at.

I rarely have conversations about the kind of editing that goes into a particular image, so what I'm learning (read: self-teaching) is entirely my own opinions and thoughts based on what I have seen and experienced, with some level of research combined with my own aesthetic ideals. Something that I have come to realise is that I tend to edit an image in a very different way depending on the genre it falls into. For example, I would edit an 'art-nude' image very differently to how I would edit a 'glamour' shot. Below is an example of two a ‘final’ images that were both self-shot and edited by me, both (for arguments sake) in black and white.

The first image (above) was about creating and capturing shape. The natural shapes I can create using my body and two pieces of rope, enhanced by controlling the light. The amount of “editing” I have done to ‘enhance’ the body shape? Zero, zilch, nada. I’m actually not wearing any makeup at all in these shots and very little work has been done in photoshop other than a black and white conversion, ‘cleaning up’ the background and combining the images into a triptych. For me, altering the shape of the body in this image would have done nothing to the overall effect, it was not the focus and would have been wasted time.

The second image however is the complete opposite! This image is ALL about shape and texture. Latex is a material that is made to be smooth, sleek and cling to the body like a second skin. In the original (unedited) image, there were bumps and folds where I moved and the latex creased (a completely natural thing that happens when you wear latex) but in the final image I wasn’t looking for ‘natural’ I was looking for drama, impact and fantasy. So what use is it keeping an image totally ‘real’ if the thing I want to create is not reality?

Below is a step by step creation of a similar image (from the same set) for comparison. I made a HUGE number of small ‘edits’ to make this set of images image what it is, but the main tool I learnt about using was ‘liquify’ (in Photoshop). Although I did a lot such as altering the colour, shadows (eyes especially) and managing reflections, the biggest impact to the overall ‘final’ images are the changes made using the liquify tool. (note: the majority of the effects are only noticeable when the image is of a large size)

So how does this make me feel? Well, with people constantly telling me how my body ‘should’ look, surely modifying my own body in such dramatic ways would lead to yet further body confidence issues and aligning to the 'ideals' of others? But actually I’ve found the whole process fascinating and grounding. It has made me realise that I’m not editing the image into how I want to be (how I want my real-life body to look/change) what I’m doing is creating a fantasy (My fantasy). Using my body as the base tool for inventing a concept. In ‘real life’ I am not a cat with latex skin, but in the fantasy of image creation I can become anything! (And that is awesome!)

It’s not that my body needs changing to align with beauty standards (someone interestingly pointed out that these are also often different in different cultures) but I’m changing my body to create a more professional-looking fantasy image – and I’m totally okay with that! Plus, I somehow managed to teach myself how to use Photoshop enough to bring my ideas into fruition and that is something I’m super proud of!

Thank you to anyone that bothered to read this all the way through! I'd love to hear your thoughts - and i'm sure you know how to get hold of me to discuss such things, though my email is: MissScarlotRose@hotmail.com if you are genuinely interested in discussing the above thoughts/concepts.

And for those just wishing to see the 'final results', here is a slideshow of the images I edited from this set:

And a few that I decided to keep in colour:

I'm also a fan of keeping some of these images grouped as a collective, if I were to print and exhibit them I would likely keep these together - though for the purposes of online I have linked them using photoshop: