[photopress:blog_dove_girls.jpg,full,centered] So in the now age old world of photo retouching in print advertising, the Dove ad campaign for real beauty that has touted itself as the real women (not the crazy skinny models, photoshopped to be fembots that we see daily in the mags and online) may have retouched these real women?
Say it ain’t so.
Or maybe say:

“Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

and that’s exactly what Pascal Dangin, famed photo retoucher said.
At first.
But then Ogilvy (the ad agency) and Dove has some time to research and came up with this response:

“Let’s be perfectly clear – Pascal does all kinds of work – but he is primarily a printer – and only does retouching when asked to. The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning. There was to be NO retouching and there was not,” confirmed Annie Leibovitz, commenting on the ProAge campaign.

[photopress:dove1.jpg,full,centered]
ad for Dove by Annie Leibowitz

Mr. Dangin responded, “The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the Dove “real women” ad. I only worked on the Dove ProAge campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction – both the integrity of the photographs and the women’s natural beauty were maintained.”

We didn’t want to weigh in until both sides had time to respond.

So for what its worth, we feel that at the heart of the campaign showing women of all sizes and ages, in various stages of dress (nude and underwear) is a huge step in the right direction, regardless.
Should they be chest beating, and self righteous about that approach? Not really.
Does the product actually do what it purports to do? No idea.
Are you shocked that a beauty ad campaign, or any other for that matter, has enhanced, cleaned up, smoothed out, removed marks or otherwise “adjusted” the image designed to sell you a product?

Dove went on to respond :

“Dove’s mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by widening the definition of beauty and inspiring them to take great care of themselves. Dove strives to portray women by accurately depicting their shape, size, skin color and age.”

Now remember, there are still normal sized women in these ads. So whether or not they were retouched, get over it. It is pushing a rock up a multi-billion hill, full of grossly disturbing promises and personas, promoted to the women of our culture.

The whole situation has been likened to the Campbell Soup/ Marbles controversy when a bowl of soup was photographed with a bunch of clear marbles in the bottom bowl to give the appearance that a single serving can of soup was heavily laden with vegetables, which it truly wasn’t. the marbles raised the level and gave what vegetables that were there higher, fuller profile.

Take if from one who has spent a day picking out the perfect potato chips (color and size) to shoot for an ad. No bag of Lay’s Chip I’ve ever eaten were that perfect. Looked great in print though.

If you can cut them some slack here, I’m sure Dove acknowledges the damage done.

But the glass being half-full, take another look at the viral video that kicked off the campaign in a huge way.

So?
Are we cool now? you all good?
Let’s bring on the comments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Photo News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.