Kate Winslet and Nelly Furtado both lamented the extreme digital treatment given their photographs by GQ and FHM magazines.

Kate Winslet and Nelly Furtado both lamented the extreme digital treatment given their photographs by GQ and FHM magazines.

CREDIT: Aaron Harris, The Canadian Press

'You work hard to represent a certain thing and have a certain image and somebody can take it all away with the cover of a magazine'

Digital manipulation first caused a stir 20 years ago when National Geographic magazine slimmed down the Great Pyramids to fit its cover.

Throw the pixels forward a couple of decades and consider Nelly Furtado and Kate Winslet, both beautiful women with faces and bodies eminently capable of extracting a cover price from potential readers browsing magazine racks.

But apparently they aren't beautiful or well-chiselled enough. Editors at British boy-mag FHM weren't happy with Nelly Furtado's stomach so they gave her a flatter, muscular replacement before putting her on their cover early last year. And to emphasize the handiwork, they shortened Furtado's shirt to just below her breasts. Singing sensation Nelly wasn't happy.

"I don't like being misrepresented to my fans," she said. "You work hard to represent a certain thing and have a certain image and somebody can take it all away with the cover of a magazine."

The Kate Winslet case is more egregious, even comical.

Titanic star Winslet, who has often spoken proudly of her curvaceous full figure, was digitally butchered by GQ magazine in its current issue. She looms large from the cover, her body balancing precariously on high-heeled shoes and a pair of digitally chiselled legs resembling stilts. Winslet was not happy either, especially as the cover image is in total conflict with the interview she gave the magazine, in which she lamented the obsession between thin and sexy.

"What is sexy?" she said. "All I know from the men I've ever spoken to is that they like girls to have an arse on them. So why is it that women think in order to be adored they have to be thin? I just don't understand that way of thinking."

Digital manipulation is now the norm in fashion and entertainment magazines and although Winslet and Furtado are extreme examples, the desire to make models and celebrities more "attractive" than they are in the flesh has created an industrial-strength myth of artificial beauty. In mainstream news media -- newspapers, television and news magazines -- manipulating photographs without informing readers, or viewers, is considered lying, an ethical breach akin to inventing stories and presenting them as fact.

Since National Geographic editors played fast and loose with their (then) new technology, mainstream media have adopted strict rules. But fashion and entertainment magazines have fewer, if any constraints.

Jane Tallim, education director of the Ottawa-based Media Awareness Network, an educational group funded by major Canadian media companies, says the challenge is to help readers understand that most images in entertainment or fashion-oriented magazines do not reflect real people. And models employed to sell products in magazine ads or the glossy flyers that come with the newspaper are rarely as perfect as they seem.

"Only a small percentage of the population can meet the physical demands of a super model," she said. "But now, apparently, even they can't reach the necessary standard of perfection. If Kate Winslet can't meet the standard for a magazine cover, what chance do the rest of us have? It's daunting. Why is this unattainable attractiveness for boys and girls being pushed to the limit?"

Retouching photographs is routine in Canadian magazines, says Fashion magazine editor Leanne Delap.

"It doesn't go on in Canada to the extent it does in Britain," she said, "but retouching has permeated the industry both in advertising and editorially. Photos were always retouched for such things as skin tone, or a crease in a skirt, but with new technology, the temptation is to do more."

The policy at Fashion is not to alter the bodies of models or celebrities, added Delap.

"We don't trim thighs," she said, "or slim a waistline, or reduce a bulge on a hip -- not that models generally have them. That's not to say that retouching isn't extensive but it's really still more about changing skin tone. And we do occasionally blur out nipples for taste."

Rita Sylvan, editor of the Canadian edition of Elle, has a similar policy.

"Yes, we do it," she said. "If we do a photo shoot and the model has not shaved her underarms, we will clean that up because it wasn't intended. She just wasn't careful and it isn't something a reader needs to see. And it's not like she's making a statement about letting her underarm hair grow. We'll also do it if a model is tired, or getting over the flu or has a pimple. They are little corrections that we make as a matter of course."

Elle Canada, which uses mostly models on its covers, also has access to a giant worldwide database of faces and bodies photographed for the more than 30 Elle magazines around the globe. Only the commissioning magazine has any way of knowing to what extent a photograph may have been altered.

The retouching of photographs, added Sylvan, is part of the entertainment value of a magazine but must be evaluated as only part of its content.

"When readers put our magazine down," she said, "we hope they feel better about themselves and not worse. We don't want a reader to feel she is not thin enough, rich enough, smart enough or hip enough. But we live in a very image-conscious age and people want to see trends, and expect magazines like Elle to deliver that excitement and energy and fantasy about fashion. People get enough of regular life."

Covers are a magazine's selling tool and although the competition is increasingly stiff on Canada's major city newsstands, the pressure is not as great as in the U.K. where the battle for readers' attention is fierce.

Canadians are the world's most loyal magazine subscribers, says Bill Shields, editor of the magazine industry publication Masthead. About 80 per cent of Canadian magazines are bought through subscription, the opposite of the U.K.

"The battle for readers, especially in the U.K., is extremely intense," he said. "And that's why you have those recent controversies over Winslet and Furtado. Digital enhancement is a trick to get sales."

Delap's company recently launched Fashion 18, a new magazine for teens she claims is acutely aware of its readership's obsession with body image.

"One of the mandates of the teen magazine," she said, "is to be positive about body image and more closely represent reality. That's why we go with celebrities on the cover. With celebrities, you are presenting unrealistic images that already exist in the marketplace, you're not creating and manipulating a new fantasy."

By "unrealistic images," Delap means that magazines wanting to feature celebrities on their covers are usually at the mercy of agents, movie companies or the celebrities themselves, who insist on having final approval. With few exceptions, photographs of celebrities who have committed to a photo session for a magazine, are subsequently altered.

A recent Fashion magazine cover featuring teen vocalist Britney Spears was shot in Los Angeles, by a local celebrity photographer who dealt directly with Spears' "people."

The magazine received a package of images from which it was allowed to choose but Delap says she does not know what agreement was made between the photographer and Spears' press agent.

In other words, it's a trade-off. If a magazine wants access to celebrities, they have to play by the rules dictated by celebrities and their advisers.

"Control in general has gone out of magazine editors' hands," said Delap, "but if you have Britney on the cover, the magazine will sell three times as many copies."

Older readers are unlikely to be overly influenced by magazine photographs showing someone "a little on the perfect side," says Elm Street magazine editor Gwen Smith.

"It's different with magazines aimed at impressionable teenage kids," according to Smith, who allows her art department to make only minor cosmetic changes to photographs -- removing zits or other tiny blemishes

Smith said the doctoring of the Winslet photograph is puzzling.

"I don't understand why they go there," she said. "She is a woman who is proudly rounded and a natural-looking beautiful woman. I don't know why they would do that."

Smith says Elm Street readers sometimes complain that models featured in the magazine are too thin.

"But clothes tend to hang better on tall, thin people," she said.

Current fashions are also putting huge pressure on younger people, she added.

"To look good wearing the low-rise jeans that kids like Avril Lavigne are wearing, girls need to have hips of a pre-pubescent boy and abs of steel. And most young girls have neither."

A tiny minority of celebrities, including former Vogue model Lauren Hutton, 58, and 50-year-old Isabella Rossellini, are either indifferent or hostile toward having their images doctored.

"We have to be able to grow up," Hutton told an interviewer. "Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we've been through and who we want to be."

Rossellini, blessed with the striking beauty of her mother Ingrid Bergman, spent years as a model but now forbids the doctoring of her photographs.

"She's a very attractive woman, with a mature women's body, said Elle magazine editor Rita Sylvan. "She isn't trying to pretend she's still 20 and hasn't had a life."

As "digital plastic surgery" becomes more widespread, and more accepted, readers of all media have become increasingly skeptical, warns Kenny Irby, a specialist in photography at the Poynter Institute of Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

"Citizens," he said, "are presented with truth and fiction every day, even in publications that pride themselves on a high level of ethical integrity in their visual content.

"In every newspaper and news magazine," he added, "you have editorial and advertorial content and the advertising content is almost always manipulated -- blemishes cleaned up, hair colour changed, and bodies etched. These stand alongside images that are truthful, authentic and documentary. The great challenge is helping readers distinguish between the two. Seeing is no longer believing."

Media Awareness Network's Jane Tallim says education in the ways of digital alterations is especially important for younger people.

"Air brushing and other photography tricks have existed forever," she said, "and most people are aware of it. But technology has created seamless images that from the perspective of young people, can create unnatural standards. We need to help them understand that these are not true images, and part of the way to do that is to let them play with the technology and have some fun with it."

Magazine editors are reluctant to label manipulated photographs because they say readers can usually figure it out for themselves.

"I honestly don't think that's necessary," said Delap. "If you're putting a different body on someone, then yes, absolutely. I'm glad the story about Kate Winslet came out because creating a different person like that is total crap."

But it's also important to be realistic and understand the pressures of the magazine market, she added.

"I don't think you can be an editor with an interest in selling magazines if you take a giant stand on all of this. But you do have to have limits."

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