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 Click.
If you had never been to a fashion shoot, you might think click
was where it ended. Pascal Dangin knows better. He's the man whom
photographers, designers and editors seek out to perfect the
pictures—and the people—who appear in fashion magazines. Dangin
is founder and head of Box Studios in New York City, the fashion
world's most sought-after photo-retouching firm. As the essential
"postproduction" man for Annie Leibovitz, Craig McDean and other
top-tier photographers, Dangin draws out possibilities within the
negative after the picture is snapped. Not incidentally, he also
improves any skimpy eyebrows, plump thighs or detectable pores.
Whatever Kate Hudson or Gwen Stefani or Nicole Kidman might look
like in fact, what she looks like in Harper's Bazaar or W is
often Dangin's doing.
At his studio in lower Manhattan, he and his assistants sit at
computer keyboards to soften lighting, heighten colors or erase
crowsfeet. (The hardest flaw to deal with? "Bad toes.") But in a
day when fashion magazines are publishing "Frankenstars"—women
assembled for the page by bolting a head from one shot to a body
from another—some of the flesh-and-blood stars are protesting.
In recent months Kate Winslet and Julia Roberts have complained
that they were unreasonably remade (not by Dangin) on magazine
covers. "Postproduction capability should not be looked at as a
voodoo practice," he insists. "It's been like this forever. The
black-and-white photography of old Hollywood stars was extremely
airbrushed." Call it voodoo or magic, we had him do a bit of it
for this issue. He replaced the cover model's mouth with one from
another picture of the same woman. Does she look too good to be
true?
Wink. —By Richard Lacayo
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