On vacation, I caught my reflection in a mirror in the bathroom of an all-you-can-eat buffet place. I looked distorted. Too long, taller than I really am. I contemplated the nature of the distortion, and considered the idea that they may be trying to make women tell themselves they're thin enough, and can eat some more. Then I caught my reflection in the bathroom's other mirror, and noticed it stretched me the other way- made me look wide and squat.
Upon subsequent reflection, (pun intended...you know me...) I think it may be a way to manipulate bulimics. But at the time, it cheesed me off for another reason.
Distortion. Distorted visual images in general. They fill our world: Manipulated reproductions of real images – airbrushed, stretched, cropped, edited – and the vast majority are images of the human body. Some are animals, like those weird dogs & cats with too-big eyes, or like cartoon characters. But the grossest ones are masquerading as real imagery. Photoshopped reality.
Nowadays, if you have a photo that is the wrong dimensions for the space it needs to fit, all you have to do is stretch it. People do this all the time. A couple years ago, there was a photo of Dingo in the paper that dove me crazy. It's one of my favorite shots of him, riding a Spin Cycle, But when they splashed his mug across the front page, they stretched him vertically to where he looked like a parody of himself. It doesn't bother Dingo at all, but it drives me crazy. I think it bothers me that we are so used to our imagery being bent & stretched, we hardly notice.
For example: video formatting. Sometimes a DVD can't seem to make up its mind if it wants to be letterboxed, or stretched, or what.
My in-laws have one of those great big flat screen tvs. When I first plopped myself down in front of it, I thought it would be a great screen to watch Star Wars, or something else really visually cool. But then, Dingo & I watched a few shows, and I found that there's a sweet spot in the screen, where the image is undistorted. Most seats in the room offer a view that is oddly stretched around the edges. I thought to myself: people pay hundreds of dollars to look at all their movies all screwed up? Better off investing in a video projector, where the distortion is minimal, and can be compensated for to achieve a clear picture.
To keep my internal imaging clear, I'm trying to stay mindful of all the media I take in, and avoid getting used to seeing things bent out of shape.