Limor Fried, I love you. :)

http://clottedink.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/what-good-is-good-is/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adafruit/5538367530
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adafruit/5538367452

It is her, she does look like that, get over it.

It is a very different look for Fried, and I think that that’s what is really behind the rush to judge this as a glam shoop. I don’t know Cord Jefferson, or what goes on inside his head, but his rant reads very much like that of someone who had a secret crush on Fried and was startled to see her channeling Rosie the Riveter.

One is a snapshot. One is a professional photo shoot for a glossy mag. Get a grip! Embrace the difference between impromptu & planned professional presentation.

Yay for engineers that happen to be women. Yay, I say!

In this day and age someone making an effort about their appearance is DISGUSTING!

That seems to be what they all want: plastic bodies with their ‘client-like’ plastic faces.

Jeez – why not just go the whole hog and reduce everything down to mathmatical functions, nodes and vectors, if reality offends them so much?

The rationale seems to be that if they don’t have their client’s ‘cellulite’ (read: normal body fat) removed and don’t have their limbs made thinner, then the gossip mags are going to go after them.

The gossip mags who are constantly presented with fake, super-perfect images of these slebs, who then obviously pounce on any sign of imperfection – to highlight (in their minds) how ‘normal’ these people actually are …. which leads to ever-more paranoid reps, I guess.

Illustration is, at least, more honest in its fakery.

Add in that the photographer was obviously going for a 40s cartoon style to evoke the original image, and I don’t see the problem. It’s obviously the same person in all the pictures, and she looks fine in all of them.

Given that pretty much every professional photograph you will ever see will have had SOME kind of ‘photoshopping’ done to it, the tool itself isn’t the problem, it’s those that use it.

In the same way as before photoshop the same things were done by hand.

How dare people try to make their photographs look good? These pesky magazines should be using a 2mp camera phone, I’d like everything to look shit personally.

I understand the basic idea that calling a woman a girl is like calling a man a boy, so should be fairly self-evidently an insult. However, where I am it’s often used as a counterpart to “guys” rather than “boys” – as in “guys and girls”, equivalent to “guys and gals” in many other places. To me it seems derogatory the same way that “policemen” is a sexist term, that is a result of pervasive attitudes and used mainly through oversight. To me that seems a problem, but probably not so much as deliberate sexism like when women are called “bitches” or worse.

But maybe I am missing something. Is this generally the nature of your objection, or is there something worse still about this kind of language? I know it’s not your job to educate me, but if you could at least throw a link to a discussion, it would be nice. Right now I can try to avoid the term, but I certainly couldn’t justify to anyone why they should.

Those people that keep claiming she looks the same need a serious eye examination (and here I am not making a value judgement about her physical appeareance, some other people had already commented how they find more attractive the undoctored versions of her persona).

Some people have started to scratch at the surface of the crux of the matter: the picture in Wired is weird, or at the very least, different.

Some people say it is because she glammed up for it, or because it is the style of the photographer or because photogrpahs are taken to “tell a history”. I think only the most cynical or deluded individual would not agree that the cover photogrpah is not really her, but an idealized, pre-planned version of her.

And full of curioisity I began to look at previous covers of Wired, inevitably all the men look as they normally do.

So the question is, why Wired felt the need to present us a fundamentally different version of the real day to day Lady Ada, when it is not doing so when they portray men?

All the publishing industry does this routinely, and it seems people are so used to it that now they expect it and are even prepared to defend and justify this commercial sexist neo-Stalinism in commercial photography.

The non existing photoshopping is a side issue (most things you can do in Photoshop can be done with careful planning at the moment of taking a picture), the issue should be what are magazines trying to tell us, and why they keep trying to say it in the way they do.

And after thinking about it, my guess is sexism, nowadays not necessarily explicit, but it is an attitude: a man can be scruffy, unshaven, etc. etc and will make subject with “character”. A woman that is less than immaculate is immediately plunged in make up, photoshopped and glammed up beyond recognition, to the point tha we lose the essence of the real person.

I think that is what got lost in the Wired cover: the essence of Lady Ada. The picture may be pretty, even to her own liking, that does not mean it is conveying a fair representation of who she really is (as she pretty much accepts herself: “if I do this, this, and that, then I really look like that….)” …..

I think quite a few people need to enrol in some studio portrait classes.

Some soft lighting gels or softboxes or acres of reflected lighting, a soft portrait lens and maybe a gel on the lens (not sure, seems to sharp for that, although the ‘glow’ round the face could be) and naturally young good skin or some makeup and voila!

Photographers managed fine before Photoshop you know…it just needs more planning and gear, and time – which most celebs don’t have to give, sadly. Cheaper to ‘shop…doesn’t mean you can’t do it for reals, though…and no ‘cheating’.

I like the Wired shoot, I have to say ‘ugh! Too much gold reflector!’ on the other Jill Greenberg shoots http://www.manipulator.com/Commissions/photos/shiny-faces#/ – that’s why they look like they’ve spent too long in the tanning salon…and makeup probably. Sorry, it’s not a good look. But not shopped either…

My wife’s an engineer, and she absolutely thinks of herself as a scientist and of her profession as science.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm7q0tsYGQQ