skin and bones

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i wonder if a picture can describe experience? i want to believe in connection, in conversation. in this ad the decision was made to not retouch the "arab" girl, her skin. can you feel it? perhaps i'm particularly sensitive to the texture of skin, the touch of it. i teach retouching. i'm a photographer. i have bad skin. but why and how was this ad released like this? is it a mistake? is it a comment? is it a ploy, a meta-ploy, to get us talking about the ad itself (see the tag line). i work in advertising and i collect photos about photos and photos about ads, but this seems simultaneously too subtle and too crass. our white american girl with perfect skin is at high school, wondering about her doppelganger with bad skin cloistered behind curtained windows on the other side of the world. is this our new story? our new social network? can the bones of this new experience really be wrapped in the old skin of snap decisions about surface beauty and the deeper prejudices that those decisions inform? i just don't know.

this version of this jawbone ad was published in the New Yorker Magazine in the December 22 & 29 issue, 2008. let me know if you see it someplace else.

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