Pascal Dangin might not be a household name like Vogue or Charlize Theron or Giselle. However in the world of fashion, beauty and photography, this man is a guru — a *go to * guy when it comes to cleaning up editorial and advertising photographs for companies that range from magazine publishing to major corporations involving movies, television, transportation and many more corporate industries.
According to the May 12, 2008 piece by Lauren Collins entitled
Pixel Perfect: Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality,
New Yorker Magazine , the secret door behind the secret wall is lifted to show you just what it takes to create those publications and bill boards that we see and think that we must emulate or at least approximate in terms of beauty and perfection.
Photograph by Josef Astor
According to this article by Ms. Collins, even the most beautiful humans (*models, celebrities) get “retouched” by Dangin for covers, ads, layouts and editorial spreads. The model cited to require the least amount of touch-ups is Christy Turlington which is quite interesting since she isn’t working full-time as a model any longer but is still quite the beautiful woman.
Dangin is not well-known outside the world of photography, in fact primarily known within the world of a specific sphere of photographers who consider themselves lucky to work with Pascal as he has a select core of clients and he is painstakingly precise and obsessed with perfecting a photograph– down to the precisely right shade of green grass.
While Collins mentions that about 30 celebrities keep him on retainer to make sure all photos are aethetically perfect before they are releases and quotes various people about what it is specifically or metaphorically that Dangin does, they never quite make it clear enough for the public to assess that any photo on the major fashion and news magazines, corporate photos and specific celebrities have been retouched to make sure that there are no blemishes, flaws or any “lacks ” or “excesses” being reflected in the photo.
What Pascal Dangin does is retouch the photos to make sure that the person or items are undeniably perfect– without flaws. That may require increasing or decreasing the size or length of body parts, eliminating blemishes or grey hair-even adding hair or changing the color of nail polish. However rather than just your average Photoshopping geek, Dangin is one of the few artistically obsessed Photoshop experts who can pretty much pick their own clients and projects when it comes to retouching and cleaning up photography. His expert genius is that of an artist who understands the creative impulse of the photographer and what needs to be done to enhance that photograph to make it sheer perfection without making the obvious mistakes (flipping the photo and mismatching sides, colors etc).
While you can’t see this article in print, unless you have a spare May 2008 issue laying around or hit the library to see a copy, there is the article online that goes into greater detail about this creative genius whose interests lie far beyond the world of Photoshop retouching. Dangin’s other work is master printing– digitally cleaning up old negatives and providing new negatives that are rich with color or tone and have a depth to them that had been lost with time. He’s also a publisher of fine art books, with the imprint/name of SteidlDangin
However when it comes to fashion and beauty, it’s important to know that Dangin most likely has had a hand on the images that you see and thus everything that you see as so beautiful and perfect is not quite so in real life. It’s a bit of smoke, magic and mirrors in a sense because everyone looks better when Dangin has his mouse and keyboard working on that image.
So if you think celebrity X, Y or Z doesn’t breakout, or is so thin or has perfectly shaped (fill in your blank), realize that they don’t. It’s all courtesy of Pascal Dangin!!
Thanks to Chris Abraham for his blog that featured this piece. I would never have known about Pascal Dangin–though I follow the photography world pretty closely, he’s an enigma to most and a closely guarded secret.
Stevie Wilson
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