Not nipped, tucked or sucked, but possibly retouched?
Facing a public relations onslaught, beauty products giant Unilever and advertising shop Ogilvy & Mather moved into damage control yesterday, insisting allegations of photographic corruption in Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign are not true.
Interviewed this week in The New Yorker, celebrity photo retoucher Pascal Dangin said he had an airbrushed go at the rounded, soft-tummied underwear-clad ladies featured in the campaign three years ago.
"Do you know how much retouching was on that?" Mr. Dangin asked New Yorker writer Lauren Collins. "But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone's skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive."
By midday yesterday, the charges were spreading like brush fire on Internet news sites, and a Unilever spokesperson said the company had engaged a team to investigate. In a statement late yesterday, the company insisted Mr. Dangin was never employed on that campaign, which "was created and produced entirely by Ogilvy from start to finish and the women's bodies were not digitally altered."
The charges, if true, would have irreparably damaged the Dove campaign, which has built its DNA on championing "real" women with "real" curves. More recent contributions to the campaign, coming from Ogilvy's Toronto offices, have included the award-winning Evolution video featuring an ordinary woman whose image is retouched to remove pocks and pimples, lengthen her neck and raise her eyebrows. In other words, the very sort of work at which Mr. Dangin is so adept. "No wonder our perception of beauty is disoriented," is the video's excoriating tag line.
Evolution was followed by Onslaught, featuring a fusillade of cellulite-sucking, face-plumping images, leading to the tag line: "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does." The campaign has extended to a self-esteem fund, "to help free the next generation from self-limiting stereotypes."
From the get-go, the allegation of photo fiddling was perplexing. Mr. Dangin is renowned for fixing photos of such celebrities as J. Lo and Madonna and for his work alongside famed photographer Annie Leibovitz.
But Ms. Leibovitz didn't do the "underwear" shoot. Those images were shot by Rankin in the U.K. "The women are posing proudly and confidently in their underwear - the photos have not been altered or retouched," Unilever said at the time of the campaign launch.
Ms. Leibovitz did do an earlier shoot featuring the close-up, deeply lined faces of women over 50. "The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning," she said in a statement via Unilever yesterday. "There was to be NO retouching and there was not."
Mr. Dangin - "an adept plumper of breasts and shrinker of pores," in The New Yorker's description - said in the release the error was that of the magazine. "The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the Dove 'real women' ad. I only worked on the Dove ProAge campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do some colour correction."
Witheringly, Ms. Leibovitz, in what is the highest-level dust-up to hit the ad industry in a long while, deemed Mr. Dangin "primarily a printer."
© The Globe and Mail
