May 18, 2010

In a strange twist to the usual debate in the modelling world, a British magazine is under fire for airbrushing a photo of a model to make her look heavier.

Jane Druker, the editor of the UK"s health and wellbeing magazine, Healthy, has admitted to digitally manipulating the model"s image on the magazine"s April cover.

Apparently, the model, Kamila Wladyka, had lost a significant amount of weight in the week between her casting and the date of the photo shoot. Druker claimed that Wladyka had appeared to be in good health initially but by the time she posed for the cameras she was so skinny that her photo required dramatic retouching.

Druker said that while the Polish model has a beautiful face, her extreme thinness gave her the appearance of ill-health, adding, "That"s not a reflection of what we do in our magazine, which is about good health."She says they added approximately half a stone to Kamilla"s photo to make the 178-centimetre model look "a little bit bigger, to make her look like she was a size ten as opposed to a size four".

Model agency Chic Management"s description of Wladyka states that she is a US size eight.In the magazine"s defence, Druker explained that digitally altering models" body shapes was not standard procedure at the publication, saying: "It"s not what we normally do and I would never want to mislead people."

But critics are unforgiving of the move. Eating disorder activist, Susan Ringwood, who has campaigned for the use of diversely sized fashion models, told Britain"s Daily Telegraph that Healthy"s manipulated images are "hugely disappointing".She said: "It"s just not helpful and puts huge pressure on people to keep up a hyper-perfectionism that isn"t real. If you can"t trust the health industry to be healthy, how can you expect the fashion magazines to put their house in order?"

Meanwhile famously slender UK supermodel Jodie Kidd highlighted the ethical distinction between correcting minor flaws in an image and radically distorting a model"s appearance, saying: "Re-touching for little blemishes is fine, but putting weight on, taking weight off, that goes too far."

Source

smh.com.au