Jerry Malik and I are sitting at his computer one recent afternoon, looking at digital images of women in various stages of undress. He points his cursor to a softly lit photo he took of a svelte naked woman. She’s leaning on her elbows against the arm of a couch, her back slightly arched and her eyes lightly shut. Just as I’m thinking that the woman looks like she’s about to fake an orgasm, Malik says, “I don’t see why every woman on the planet wouldn’t want at least one picture like that of herself.”
Malik shows me how he can achieve effects in Photoshop that other photographers create with expensive equipment and lighting techniques. He opens images from his own archives as well as ones he’s downloaded from the Web and scanned into his computer. With a few drags and clicks he eliminates shadows, corrects for poor exposures, and changes the perspective of shots to make them look as though they’ve been taken with different lenses.
He thought the intervention “made for a nicer picture,” and Malik wants his clients to like the way they look. If they like the way they look, there’s a better chance they’ll order photos. “I’m like any other person selling a product, so I’ll maybe make some things a little skinnier, do a little of this, a little of that, with the hope of them going, ‘God, I look great and I have to have it.’”
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The implications of retouching disturb me, and though I’d probably have a hard time proving my case, I believe there are social consequences when it’s done routinely. The latest issue of Esquire, for example, bills its cover story as a “man’s survival guide” to how women age, as if the phenomenon is a trauma cruelly inflicted on its male readers.
After his brother chewed him out, Malik recalls, “I said, ‘Jim, it’s a picture–I didn’t buy you a gift certificate for cosmetic surgery. It’s just a stupid picture.’”
I get further confused when I watch Malik erase a woman’s tattoos. I do not feel uneasy, as I did when I saw him remove wrinkles. Instead I wonder which is a more “natural” photo of the woman, the one with or without her tattoos?
