the photo whisperer
While working on the lens chipping process, my father showed me this article about the amazing work of Pascal Dangin. Retouching not being quite the right word for it, Dangin’s services are kept on-call by various A-list celebrities, whose photos will not go into a publication without Dangin’s subtle touch. An interesting intersection of creativity, art, and technology are woven into lush and uber life-like portrayals.
Here is an example:
I am intrigued by his take on digital photography in general (his lab has created a software package to imbue digital photography with a film-like sensibility): “I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”
One fun fact: somewhere in every picture, Dangin likes to sneak in something red.
Another: this article sparked a bit of a controversy over the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign — while staying true to the portrayals of “real women”, all of these images were aesthetically (and antithetically?) retouched by Dangin.