by Tina Fey
Et voilà! Just two to three hours after your arrival, you are ready to be taken to the photographer and shot.
There are different types of fancy photographers. Some are big, fun personalities like Mario Testino, who once told me, “Lift your chin, darling, you are not eighteen.” I enjoyed his honesty. Also, I’m pretty sure he says that to models who are nineteen.
Some photographers plan out every detail of the shot, then plug you into it. For example, with Annie Leibovitz, you might have advance fittings for several custom Tinkerbell costumes. On the day of the shoot, Annie will pick one of the costumes, then obscure it with a large harness. Afterward, she’ll remove the harness with Photoshop, change the color of the costume, and shrink you down to the size of a pea anyway.
There are the nonchalant “cool guy” photographers who shoot for Rolling Stone and GQ. Watch out for these guys, because their offhand manner can trick you and the next thing you know, you’re posing with your pants off. Or worse, with your shoes off.
I’m a firm believer in our constitutional right to wear shoes, and I believe more people should take advantage of it. I never go barefoot during a photo shoot. Even if they say your feet are “out of frame,” don’t believe them. I know what you’re thinking and no, I don’t have horrible messed-up feet.
Maybe my feet are so amazing that I want to shelter them so they can live a normal life. I don’t want them to be the Suri Cruise of feet. Did you ever think about that?
The photographer will ask you what kind of music you want to play during the shoot. Remember that whatever you choose will be blasted through the loft and heard by an entire crew of people who are all so cool that the Board of Ed. officially closed school.
Just murmur, “Hip-hop,” or make up the name of a hipster-sounding band and then act superior when they’ve never heard of it. “Do you guys have any Asphalt of Pinking? *disappointed+ Really?
[shrug] Whatever you want, then.”
Sometimes they ask if you want to hook up your iPod for background music. Do not do this. It’s a trap. They’ll put it on shuffle, and no matter how much Beastie Boys or Velvet Underground you have on there, the following four tracks will play in a row: “We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover” from Annie,
“Hold On” by Wilson Phillips, “That’s What Friends Are For,” Various Artists, and “We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover” from Annie.
To get through the actual shooting process, there are three skills you need to master.
1) Posing
Posing for a successful glamour portrait is very simple. Start with the basics. Turn sideways. Lean back against a wall. Move your chin forward to elongate your neck. Relax your shoulders. Make angles wherever possible. If you’re over twenty-four, smile at all times. Keep your arms slightly away from your sides so as not to smush them and make them look larger. Suck your stomach up and in, and wrap your buttocks toward the back, Pilates-style. Be yourself. When you look into the lens, imagine you are looking at a dear friend, but not a friend who would laugh at you for jutting out your chin while arching your back against a fake wall.
Know your weaknesses. For example, I have what can be described as “dead shark eyes.” But if I try too hard to look alert, I look batshit crazy, like the runaway bride. If a bout of “creepy face” sets in, the trick is to look away from the camera between shots and turn back only when necessary. This also limits how much of your soul the camera can steal.
2) Dealing with What Is Being Said to You
Most photographers have some kind of verbal patter going on when they shoot: “Great. Turn to me. Big smile. Less shark eyes. Have fun with it. Not like that.”
Some photographers are compulsively effusive. “Beautiful. Amazing. Gorgeous! Ugh, so gorgeous!” they yell at shutter speed. If you are anything less than insane, you will realize this is not sincere. It’s hard to take because it’s more positive feedback than you’ve received in your entire life thrown at you in fifteen seconds. It would be like going jogging while someone rode next to you in a slow-moving car, yelling, “Yes! You are Carl Lewis! You’re breaking a world record right now. Amazing!
You are fast. You’re going very fast, yes!”
With the wind blowing on your long extensions, you feel like Beyoncé. The moment the wind machine stops, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and wonder, “Why is the mother from Coal Miner’s Daughter here?”
Your impulse will be to wilt with embarrassment. Do not! Before you look up for the bucket of pig’s blood, remember, your third and most difficult task is “Trying to Enjoy It.”
3) Trying to Enjoy It (Proceed as if You Look Awesome.)
This requires a level of delusion/egomania usually reserved for popes and drag queens, but you can do it. It’s like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific. Your “right mind” knows that you look ridiculous in a half-open dress and giant shoes, but you must put yourself back in third grade, slipping on your mom’s quilted caftan and drinking cream soda out of a champagne glass while watching The Love Boat. You have never been more glamorous.
“Believe you are worthy of the cover,” as Mario Testino might say to a tense, shark-eyed forty year old.
After about seventeen minutes of shooting, they call lunch. The catered lunch makes you feel like you’re finally the person you always wanted to be. Vegetable tartlets. Arugula salad with figs, quinoa, fish that is somehow more flavorful and delicious than a Wendy’s hamburger. Miniature lemon meringue pies. Hibiscus iced tea. You fantasize about how wonderful your life would be if you had this food delivered every day. Oh, the energy you would have! Your stools would be museum quality. You could finally impress the fecalist.
At this point someone from your real job or home life will call to check in. Pretend you’re exhausted and that this whole photo shoot thing is a big inconvenience. Say you’ll be done by six and that you’ll be sure to get home in time to help organize the basement storage unit. Then hang up! Do not let those people kill your buzz!
Your afternoon will fly by as you get more and more confident posing like an old Virginia Slims ad.
And then you’re done. You get back into this morning’s sweatpants, brush out your hair, which by now looks like you’ve been standing on a tarmac all day, and that’s it.
You don’t get to keep the clothes, by the way. Some people say that the really famous people get to keep the clothes, but I suspect it’s just the pushiest, most deluded people who get to keep the clothes because they steal them and no one says anything. Your only keepsakes are the individual false eyelashes that you later find stuck to your boob in the shower.
(Someone should do a study of the human brain and how quickly it can adjust to luxury. You could take a homeless person who has been living on the street for twenty years, and if you let them do three magazine photo shoots, by the fourth one they’d be saying, “Louboutins don’t really work on me.
Can I try the Roger Vivier?” By the fifth one they’d sigh, “Do they not have the vegetable tartlets?
Bummer!” in a passive-aggressive tone that means “Somebody go get them.”) You may sink into a slight depression over the next thirty-six hours. You may wonder why your loved ones don’t call out, “Amazing, gorgeous, right to me!” as you scramble their eggs.
But just be patient, for in a few weeks, the magazine will be out and you will have incontrovertible proof that you are a young Catherine Deneuve. You casually check the newsstand on your way to buy Bengay heating pads. One day, there it is! Right between Jessica Simpson and those people from The Bachelor who murdered each other—it’s your face! It is your face, right? You can barely recognize yourself with the amount of digital correction. They’ve taken out your knuckles and given you baby hands. The muscular calves that you’re generally very proud of are slimmed to the bone. And what’s with the eyes? They always get it wrong under the eyes. In an effort to remove dark circles they take out any dep
th, and your face looks like it was drawn on a paper plate. You looked forward to them taking out your chicken pox scars and broken blood vessels, but how do you feel when they erase part of you that is perfectly good?
We have now entered the debate over America’s most serious and pressing issue: Photoshop.
A lot of women are outraged by the use of Photoshop in magazine photos. I say a lot of women because I have yet to meet one man who could give a fat turd about the topic. Not even a gay man.
I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society… unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.
Do I think Photoshop is being used excessively? Yes. I saw Madonna’s Louis Vuitton ad and honestly, at first glance, I thought it was Gwen Stefani’s baby.
Do I worry about overly retouched photos giving women unrealistic expectations and body image issues? I do. I think that we will soon see a rise in anorexia in women over seventy. Because only people over seventy are fooled by Photoshop. Only your great-aunt forwards you an image of Sarah Palin holding a rifle and wearing an American-flag bikini and thinks it’s real. Only your uncle Vic sends a photo of Barack Obama wearing a hammer and sickle T-shirt and has to have it explained to him that somebody faked that with the computer.
People have learned how to spot it. Just like how everyone learned to spot fake boobs—look for the upper-arm meat. If there’s no upper-arm meat, the breasts are fake. Unlike breast implants, which can mess up your health, digital retouching is relatively harmless. As long as we all know it’s fake, it’s no more dangerous to society than a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
Photoshop is just like makeup. When it’s done well it looks great, and when it’s overdone you look like a crazy asshole. Unfortunately, most people don’t do it well. I find, the fancier the fashion magazine is, the worse the Photoshop. It’s as if they are already so disgusted that a human has to be in the clothes, they can’t stop erasing human features.
“Why can’t we accept the human form as it is?” screams no one. I don’t know why, but we never have. That’s why people wore corsets and neck stretchers and powdered wigs.
If you’re going to expend energy being mad about Photoshop, you’ll also have to be mad about earrings. No one’s ears are that sparkly! They shouldn’t have to be! You’ll have to get mad about oil paintings—those people didn’t really look like that! I for one am furious that people are allowed to turn sideways in photographs! Why can’t we accept a woman’s full width?! I won’t rest until people are only allowed to be photographed facing front under a fluorescent light.
It should absolutely be mandatory for magazines to credit the person who performed the Photoshop work, just like they do the makeup artist and the stylist… in very tiny white print on white paper.
Some people say it’s a feminist issue. I agree, because the best Photoshop job I ever got was for a feminist magazine called Bust in 2004.
It was a low-budget shoot in the back of their downtown office. There was no free coffee bar or wind machine, just a bunch of intelligent women with a sense of humor.
I looked at the two paltry lights they had set up and turned to the editors. “We’re all feminists here, but you’re gonna use Photoshop, right?” “Oh, yeah,” they replied instantly. Feminists do the best Photoshop because they leave the meat on your bones. They don’t change your size or your skin color.
They leave in your disgusting knuckles, but they may take out some armpit stubble. Not because they’re denying its existence, but because they understand that it’s okay to make a photo look as if you were caught on your best day in the best light.
In an act of amazing bravery, I will let you see this photo of me with Photoshop and without.
There are seven differences. See if you can spot them.*
Photoshop itself is not evil. Just like Italian salad dressing is not inherently evil, until you rub it all over a desperate young actress and stick her on the cover of Maxim, pretending to pull her panties down. (That “thumbs in the panties” move is the worst. Really? It’s not enough that they got greased up and in their panties for you, Maxim?)
Give it up. Retouching is here to stay. Technology doesn’t move backward. No society has ever de-industrialized. Which is why we’ll never turn back from Photoshop—and why the economic collapse of China is going to be the death of us all. Never mind that. Let’s keep being up in arms about this Photoshop business!
I don’t see a future in which we’re all anorexic and suicidal. I do see a future in which we all retouch the bejeezus out of our own pictures at home. Family Christmas cards will just be eyes and nostrils in a snowman border.
At least with Photoshop you don’t really have to alter your body. It’s better than all these disgusting injectibles and implants. Isn’t it better to have a computer do it to your picture than to have a doctor do it to your face?
I have thus far refused to get any Botox or plastic surgery. (Although I do wear a clear elastic chin strap that I hook around my ears and pin under my day wig.) I can’t be expected to lead the charge on everything. Let me have my Photoshop.
For today is about dreams!
Dear Internet
One of my greatest regrets, other than being the Zodiac Killer never learning to tango, is that I don’t always have time to answer the wonderful correspondence I receive. When people care enough to write, the only well-mannered thing to do is to return the gift, so please indulge me as I answer some fans here.
From tmz.com
Posted by Sonya in Tx on 4/7/2010, 4:33 P.M.
“When is Tina going to do something about that hideous scar across her cheek??”
Dear Sonya in Tx,
Greetings, Texan friend! (I’m assuming the “Tx” in your screen name stands for Texas and not some rare chromosomal deficiency you have. Hope I’m right about that!) First of all, my apologies for the delayed response. I was unaware you had written until I went on tmz.com to watch some of their amazing footage of people in L.A. leaving restaurants and I stumbled upon your question.
I’m sure if you and I compare schedules we could find a time to get together and do something about this scar of mine. But the trickier question is What am I going to do? I would love to get your advice, actually. I’m assuming you’re a physician, because you seem really knowledgeable about how the human body works. What do you think I should do about this hideous scar? I guess I could wear a bag on my head, but do I go with linen like the Elephant Man or a simple brown paper like the Unknown Comic? Too many choices, help!
Thank you for your time. You are a credit to Texas and Viking women both.
Yours,
Tina
P.S. Great use of double question marks, by the way. It makes you seem young.
From Dlisted.com
Posted by Centaurious on Monday, 9/21/2009, 2:08 A.M.
“Tina Fey is an ugly, pear-shaped, bitchy, overrated troll.”
Dear Centaurious,
First let me say how inspiring it is that you have learned to use a computer.
I hate for our correspondence to be confrontational, but you have offended me deeply. To say I’m an overrated troll, when you have never even seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair. I’ll leave it for others to say if I’m the best, but I am certainly one of the most dedicated trolls guarding bridges today. I always ask three questions, at least two of which are riddles.
As for “ugly, pear-shaped, and bitchy”? I prefer the terms “offbeat, business class–assed, and exhausted,” but I’ll take what I can get. There’s no such thing as bad press!
Now go to bed, you crazy night owl! You have to be at NASA early in the morning. So they can look for your penis with the Hubble telescope.
Affectionately,
Tina
From PerezHilton.com
Posted by jerkstore on Wednesday, 1/21/2009, 11:21 P.M.
“In my opinion Tina Fey complet
ely ruined SNL. The only reason she’s celebrated is because she’s a woman and an outspoken liberal. She has not a single funny bone in her body.”
Dear jerkstore,
Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a “missing girl,” and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to “where she was last seen” and “how she might have been abducted by a close family friend,” and I thought, “What is this, the News for Chicks?” Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she’s secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What’s Michael Bay’s next film going to be?