Sorry about the duplicate posting!

theres a great book by robert capa called "slightly out of focus"you can see it if your ever in the art referance library at the v+a in london.flux.
but it seems that this thread ignores the body politic namely we are talking about female vanity?and thats a huge buisness-if theres spots..unseemly body hair..big noses...and the ordinary becomes the aspirational......thats billions of euros/dollars/pounds in the beauty product/industry
finished and obviously that can never happen so we have banal unreality
...however i wouldnt want to do a "terry"or a "jurgen"and make kristen mac look really bad like in that marc jacobs ad..which is the other extreme...and really just as manipulated.

I make no distinction between the manipulation of reality that digital imagery provides as opposed to the manipulation that conventional photography has always offered.
I often use a 155 lens on the 10/8 which is very close to using a fish eye or could be compared to photographing someones' reflection in a Christmas Ball.This has the effect of elongating the body almost to the proportions used in Fashion Illustration and leaves virtually none of the proportions of the body left unaffected.
(it is also hell to use!).
In a very general sense,when you photograph someone from above you present them as dominated ,whereas if you photograph someone from below you effectively present them to be looked up at,to be aspired to.This simple but enormously profound manipulation as to how this person is to be seen in the photograph is totally in the hands of the photographer.
I guess the point I am trying to get across in a rather clumsy way is that all good photography is a total manipulation of the reality and since Roger Fenton scurried around rearranging the cannon balls on the battlefields of the Crimean War it has always been thus.
Photography is at best an extremely powerful and brilliant form of visualising opinions and should be freed from its burden of being seen as the bringer of truth.

....QUOTE.......

" Modern critique - the task of exposing systematically distorted relations between subject and object - is thus iconoclastic to the core. Hegel, Feurbach,Marx, NIETZCHE, Freud, Lukacs, and Adorno all expose our communion with gods, commodities, dreams, or screen stars as projection and reifications. The projected other is the surreptitious work of the ALIENEATED SELF. The real other, like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, cannot show itself as an image, at best, is an object masquerading as a subjest. "

.......................

" The sheen BEAUTY - in ADVERTISING, FASHION,CINEMA. or mass culture - was seen as, at best, a spoonful of sugar to help the domination go down and, at worst, an addictive drug. In the 1970s and the 1980s, feminism, taken more as social movement than its many theoretical currents, has probably been the chief secular agent of iconoclasm, BEAUTY, some feminists teach, is violence by other means, The way we look at each other are acts of power. The male gaze makes women into meat. Mass-mediated ideals of beauty are both cause and effect of ANOREXIA, PLASTIC SURGERY, PHOTO DOCTORING, and SELF MUTILATION, BEAUTY is not the touch of grace: it is an effect of POWER......."

Excerpts from.....BEAUTY'S VEILS
The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Kierkegaard and Benjamin

Hi, I think people tend to still think of a single photograph as the truth. it has been the way people where informed about an event or introduced to a person you will never meet in person for so long it seems like the universal language of
all cultures. Movies, with the exception of documentary are more about being entertained. escaping. or with say David Lynch, a way people who live ordinary safe lives come in contact with the dark side of humanity without risk. So, most people could feel as though your messing with their concept of truth when you use a manipulated image. It could challenge the common perception of truth. Remember the outcry when was it Time magazine enhanced OJ Simpson's image on the cover to make him look more ominous and dark. same thing.

Interesting the mention of David Lynch because I think he mixes images, preconceptions. suspended believe in such a disconcerting and fascinating way that he actually goes much further by turning everything upside down....manipulation, sense of the truth , fantasy ........to the extent that nothing seems to fit in the traditional thinking of what a film is and its porpoise......unique !

i think the other relevant point about fashion and especialy magazine covers re womens faces and im talking about the flashed out-wrinkle-less faces that appear also too frequently..no hair,no spots..the gleaming ones.....then it becomes an affirmation to capture this look permanently through cosmetic surgery thats when it can start looking like a freak show..and like the "kings new clothes"when is somebody gona say you dont look good?you look sick....