I'm obsessed with images and anyone in the grips of an obsession will point out that it's rarely a simple lovefest. There are things that drive me nuts - I loath the kitsch candyland that is HDR photography but I get to ignore it in its entirety; I'm not a fan of photographers dodging the model's eyes until they look like the devil baby in Angel Heart but this is often an amateur mistake that people grow out of; but there is one problem in photography that seems to be growing worse - the overuse of skin smoothing. It seems to pervade out from the so-called "pro" community. It's bullshit.
I don't comment on the technical aspects of photography on this site, primarily because I am far more interested in the content of the photograph than the tools of the trade but this is something that I want to talk about because it cuts right at the heart of what I love about photography. Photography is a window on the world; the windows that I want to be looking through are visceral and provocative - I don't want to be looking through at a plastic world of fake faces, fake tans and fake tits. If you want that clusterfuck of bad ideas, look at Playboy magazine - you are wasting your time here.
I didn't want to call out any specific photographers so I followed one of the countless plug-ins, tutorials, ebooks and workshops online to illustrate my point:
To use a musical analogy, I just T-Pained the shit out of it. You could argue that a good sound engineer would be a lot more subtle with their use of autotune and that, when done properly, you shouldn't really notice it. Try autotuning Bob Dylan; you won't convince me that you have made an improvement.
All these tools do is make your work look more average. If your work is shit and average is an improvement then go ahead, knock yourself out. If you have any aspirations of finding any real beauty through your work then you are heading down the wrong path.
I'll leave you with the words of a photographer that gets it:
“Laugh lines, scars, stretch marks, tattoos, the folding wrinkles of age. These are marks life leaves on the body. A roadmap of a body’s temporal path. Each crease tells a story, each scar a mark of honor.”