Dailymail.co.uk reported a project in deception through photos done by Zilla van den Born, a graphic design student from the Netherlands, who uploaded impressive pictures from a trip to South Asia on Facebook.
The photos showed her in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and more. In reality she had never left Amsterdam, but had crafted all the pictures on the computer. Van der Born said, “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media - we create an ideal world online which reality can no longer meet.”
When her friends found out the trip was fake, they were shocked at first, but then excited.
Rob McConnell, professor in the BYUH’s Visual Art Department, worked in a marketing firm and did design and layout for magazines. “We make the skin tone look nice. If they have a glare on their face we would fix that, or if there is a tree branch sticking out of her shoulder. All the photos in the magazine are idealized beyond what is real.” Even the photographer would just take a picture from the angle and of the part he wants to show, he said.
Jess Kohlert, professor of psychology, said, “Evolutionarily speaking, the more symmetrical a face is and the less blemishes it has, the more we are going to be drawn to it.” Kohlert mentioned Mosiah 14:2, which reads, “…when we shall see him [Christ] there is no beauty that we should desire him.”
Kohlert said, “Here is the most perfect individual that has ever lived. He wouldn’t have been considered a supermodel, apparently.”
“I actually don’t like editing at all,” said hobby photographer Kyra Bright from Colorado, a freshman majoring in biomedicine. “I just like capturing the moment as it is rather than how it could be. I think some photos can be enhanced and can make them super beautiful. With Photoshop or Lightroom you can make them more vibrant and gorgeous. For advertisement purposes, people alter photos to make them more beautiful. But it can go many different ways.”
McConnell said, “I think if [altered media] is all we are around and exposed to then it affects our perception of what is normal. Media shapes even our social life. People will not show their daily, boring lives on Instagram, but photos from the best moments.” He also said it can lead people to see their own lives as being boring and less fun than others.
Kohlert said, “You are ultimately attracted to those people and things who you have access to on a very regular basis. The more you are exposed to something, the more you are going to like it. Media, music, whatever it is.”
It would take 30 years of nonstop viewing to to look at all of the approximately 350 million pictures posted to Facebook in a single day, reported geo.de.
McConnell further stated the line between editing a photo for aesthetic benefits, and the altering it to a degree of unreality or even deceit, lies in the motive for which it is changed. “I don’t think there is an issue when you take a picture of a sunset and edit the color to make them more vivid. But I won’t go so far as to cut off somebody's head and put them on a Barbie.”
McConnell said there is a particular danger for children, since they are not able to distinguish what is real and what is fiction. “If I surround myself with all these things I can learn to distinguish. It can be hard though. I just take for granted that all I see in magazines is photoshopped.”
According to Bright, the line is crossed “when you start editing things to make them look like something they aren’t. I watched a Photoshop demonstration one time. They completely changed the hair color, the size and everything of this normal woman. It looked like a completely different person. That is a line we shouldn’t cross.”
“Young people,” continued Bright, “who try to figure out who they are see those pictures and say, ‘That’s what I need to look like.’ But you physically can’t get there, because it’s an alternate reality. I went through this phase where I thought that I needed to have the perfect body, the perfect face. Then I will be happy. But the gospel has helped me to see that I have been made how I am, and I should be happy with that.”
McConnell said, “We all have the perception that because it is a picture, it must be real. A part of us always wants to believe a photo is real, even when we know it has been changed.”