Revenge of the 8ft 9inch model

March 11, 2011

Published pictures of film stars and celebs are routinely touched up and have been for 100 years or so. No surprises there. But images are now routinely stretched and distorted so that models sometimes look like freaks. The generic term for this is ‘Photoshopped’, after the pre-eminent Adobe Photoshop imaging software.

Long legs look good on a man or women, but when they are practically DOUBLED in length then we need to stop and take stock. We already hear that model’s ‘size zero’ figures and silicone boobs are causing some young girls to have a poor self image. Double-length legs may look freakish to mature readers, but how are they influencing impressionable pre-teens?

Part of the problem page sub-editors are often given an impossible space for an image. Squeezing or cutting and pasting extra limb length is one solution. Look for tabloid pages, where a narrow full page depth space is devoted to a single person and you’ll see what I mean. Of course layout subs are working under pressure and it’s much faster and easier to stretch and squeeze to make an image fit, than find news-in-brief or something else that will fill in the extra space at the foot of the column.

There is a National Union of Journalist code covering this which is supposed to make Photoshoppers own up. But when did you ever see that used as an admission of guilt?

The Saturday Telegraph magazine has some really extreme examples of the limb lengtheners at work.

Take a look here at last week’s edition (5 March 2011) it’s a doozie. I estimate that the legs have been doubled in length. Let’s say the model is 5ft 10 inches tall, then the freak you see here would measure 8 ft 9inches!! And how would she manage with a forearm twice the length of her upper arm??? Take a look – the image is reproduced exactly as it was printed.