Photoshopping Women Out Of The Picture

Lauren Brianna Lutz
brianna.lutz@gmail.com

These days some may expect that their news to have been altered in one way or another. Be it an adjusted image to emphasize a point, or an inserted sound effect to add drama, we have seen this many times. In the American Journal Review article, Viewer Beware, Deborah Potter writes, “The pressure in newsrooms to grab and hold viewers has escalated the use of techniques that add visual appeal and immediacy to the news. Most stations now have the technical capacity to do things with video and sound they could only imagine a few years ago.” As our technology progressively increases the media will have even more options and choices to alter and distort our news.

However, it was interesting to stumble upon a different example of these misleading practices. On current.com I found these images of a picture of the Israeli Government before and after the Cabinet women were photoshopped out by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers because they consider it immodest to print images of women, according to
AP news.

To see women photoshopped out of a picture is different than what we are used to in America. Usually we see distorted images of women enhanced to make them more “attractive”, rather then eliminated all together. If the Israeli Government has progressed enough to elect these women to their Cabinet, they should be given the respect they deserve and recognized for their positions just as much as their male counterparts.

Perhaps someday these editing tools will only be used to adjust images in ethical ways or for artistic purposes.


Images from current.com