This is one piece I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while now.
I just pretty much wrote it in a private Facebook group, so I figured I might as well come dump my raw thoughts here. I’ll be back to clean this up later. Until then, THE CASE FOR RETOUCHING.
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We don’t see people in stills. We see them in moving images.
A photograph freezes everything, so when we look at a portrait of someone, we are not interacting with that portrait the same way we would interact with a moving picture of them, like if they were right in front of you, speaking to you. We don’t really perceive the imperfections or even the best features in say, their face.
A still photograph seems to say “look at me”, “observe me”, maybe even “judge me”.
This is why I believe that retouching a portrait bridges the gap, or levels the playing field so to speak, in presenting an image of a person to the world in a photograph.
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