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The Eye of the Beholder


In my teens, I briefly had a boyfriend who was a serious photography buff. He couldn't stop telling me how gorgeous I was and took zillions of photos of me.

He was far from the only person in my life talented with a camera. I spent many years seeing many very flattering photos of me.

And then there was the occasional photo of me that looked seventy pounds heavier than all the others and vastly less pretty. These were always taken by my husband who had terrible eyesight and no talent with a camera.

At some point after seeing vampy photos of my older sister taken by her latest boyfriend after her divorce, I stopped making excuses and accepted that these photos said something about how my husband saw me. 

In addition to being younger, I'm the pretty sister. Seeing her through the eyes of her boyfriend via his photos of her made it impossible for me to keep believing my husband saw me as physically attractive in spite of the ugly photos he consistently took of me that just screamed "Wide load sign needed across this rear." among other things.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is ugly. My marriage didn't work for a long list of reasons and I finally realized that one of them was that while most people thought I was gorgeous, my husband saw me as fat and ugly.

To me, this is a funny story that doesn't even hurt my feelings. It makes me giggle and falls under "Sounds like a YOU problem."

But it's been food for thought for a lot of years on the topic of photos and the eye of the beholder. What the camera captures says as much and sometimes more about what is in the mind of the photographer as it does about what the subject actually looks like.

I personally hate Sam Altman, but he happens to be openly gay and I've seen some shockingly unflattering photos of him in magazine articles that did not jibe with what I saw of him in some video I watched from the YC library where he interviewed someone back when he still worked at YC.

I also read a magazine article about Luke Meagher (HauteLeMode) that had surprisingly unflattering photos of him that did not jibe with what he looks like in most of his YouTube videos. Coincidentally, he is also openly gay.

It's shocking to me that a magazine -- especially a fashion magazine -- would publish obviously unflattering photos of anyone because magazines usually go to great lengths to set a ridiculous, unattainable standard of beauty. These photos of these gay men are in stark contrast to everything I've read about how magazine photos are art, not reality, and are created via a process that helps make far too many women into the neurotic chick from White Chicks.

Magazine cover photos start with a professional model and a team of professionals to do her hair, make-up and clothes. Then a photographer takes like three hundred photos and maybe two make it to publication.

The clothes in the photo may also have a dozen or more safety pins in the back to make it fall that way and the photo may be photoshopped as well to remove minor blemishes, make the whites of her eyes whiter and so forth. Sometimes, they even elongate the legs and make other changes that create an extremely unattainable standard of beauty.

In spite of being told by so many people that I was gorgeous, I was extremely insecure in my youth and spent some years reading up on how those photos get made and also reading "Stars without makeup" articles to help deprogram me.

So I'm acutely aware that there's something weird going on if a magazine is publishing unflattering photos of someone instead of ridiculously gorgeous photos that are more beautiful in an artistic way than actual reality. 

So I am inclined to conclude that these unflattering photos of gay men are an expression of societal homophobia.

Footnotes
This has been an unpublished stub for ages. I'm just wanting to get it done at this point.

Years ago, there was a piece on Metafilter about how historic photographic processes were optimized to flatter Caucasians and actively misrepresented darker ethnicities.

I have a long history of publishing stuff and redacting it and this is a topic I've addressed repeatedly. I don't know if I've got anything similar to this still online.

Random trivia: Beholder is an evil DND monster. I was a girl gamer so I happen to know that.

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