What Is Wrong With Being Human?

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The other day, I was having a conversation with some people in the industry about computer-generated models and the brands that have started to promote them (Fenty and Balmain). They argued that this is just a trend and that it won’t necessarily mean that CGI models will replace human models in the future, as some people fear. But, nonetheless, as a consumer, I feel like it’s a bit insulting. In times when we are trying to make the industry more diverse and inclusive, we don’t need brands to make us feel that humans are not perfect enough for their advertisement campaigns.

After that conversation, however, I spent the rest of the day thinking about our perception of what is real and our relationship with everything that is fake around us. We spend our days interacting in social media and, to be honest, nothing that we see in social media is real. The curated version of ourselves that everyone sees is not really us. There is more to being us than what we let others see.

Photographer Rankin performed an experiment with 14 teenagers where he took their portrait and handed them the image to edit and filter until they felt that it was ‘social media ready’. Participants mimicked their idols, making their eyes bigger, their nose smaller and their skin brighter, and all for social media likes.

This week, during a client photoshoot, I spent the whole day posting videos and photos on my social media showing the beautiful work that we were creating. For everyone out there, that is my life. That is who I am. Yet, I only spend around 10% of my time taking photos. I never show in my social media when I am doing admin work, or when I am retouching, or when I am doing my taxes.

Nobody saw me when I woke up on the day of that shoot with sleep in my eyes and rushing to use the toilet, or when I came back from the shoot and crashed on the couch completely knackered. Those moments in my life are also a part of who I am, and probably a more human version of me than what others see, but not a very promotion-worthy one. For, in the end, that is all we do in social media, promoting a curated version of ourselves.

Those in-between moments are what makes us humans, what makes us real. And there is nothing wrong with being human, there is nothing to be ashamed of. But our industry is based on selling a fantasy, an unattainable life that presumably everyone aspires to and is tricked into thinking that by buying from a certain brand we get closer to it. The problem is that the level of perfection of a CGI model is unreachable and it would hook us into searching for that dreamed life forever. The dream of every advertising agent might be the doom of our self-image and our mental health.

Photo credit: behind the scenes shot by Emma Steventon.

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