Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So people hassle me on ModBlog all the time because I manipulate the photos. Usually that just means upping the levels and saturation and so on, but sometimes (far less often) it means distorting the picture itself as well. In any case, some people see that as perpetuating unrealistic notions about beauty. I thought about for a bit, and I'd like to say in return that those people are perpetuating urealistic notions about ugliness.

A two dimentional representation of the world, let alone a low-resolution digital version that can't even capture or display full color or brightness depth, is a pathetic and shallow view of life that insults it by its very existence. I don't know about you, but when I look at a picture of something that happened, it never looks anything like I remember it… For me, real life is vibrant, bright, undulating, and just shimmering with not just beauty but with metaphorical beauty that ties it to all other life. Stories about beauty long since gone exist inside beauty still living, you know…

I don't know that there's a way to try and reach for even a litte bit of that by messing with photos in an attempt to trigger the memory and experience of real beauty life, but that's really what I'm trying to do when it comes down to it I think… So I think that the amount of beauty that post-processing can force into a photo is more like “potential” — you can approach the true value, but you can never exceed it…

It's not so much about perpetuating unrealistic notions of beauty a la some mainstream magazine, but more about perpetuating realistic notions of beauty a la my eyes. Maybe those two things aren't so different — I'm not sure, but it could just be the same world seen through the eyes of two different story tellers — but while I don't mind explaining my actions on this subject, it's not something I'm about to apologize for in general.