As some of you know, I had an article printed in Love It magazine last week. Well, although the sentiment was there and the story came across well, the pictures weren’t the originals. You see, I have a couple of star tattoos on my chest and a tribal design on my shoulder… the ‘senior management’ saw fit to airbrush my tattoos out of the images without my permission. They didn’t even tell me, I found out once I had bought the magazine.
To say I am upset is an understatement. It is bad enough for a woman to have her identity compromised by having both her breasts removed, but for a national publication to decide that she wasn’t quite what they were looking for and that her personal appearance needed changing?..
Many of my friends have decided to email them with their letters of disgust, a lot of them have been a lot harsher than I. I’ve emailed the magazine on several ocassions but have had hardly any response, let alone an explanation or an apology.
Another issue is that there are pictures of people with tattoos on other pages of the magazine, so why have they discriminated just me?
A friend of mine works for a solicitor who investigates things like this, so I am getting the legal info of what they have actually breached here… amending images without prior permission is a big thing…
Feel free to jump on the bandwagon ladies - it’s bad enough we have to go through what we go through, without being told what we should and shouldn’t look like!!
i totally agree that they ought to have spoken to you about it before dong anything, and at least explained what they intended to do and why. There may have been a good reason, maybe on printing the tats wouldn’t be clear. I hope you get a result
hugs
That is very bad of them, at first glance, I could only see tattoos on men, so my first though was that it was a bit sexist, but I took a closer look and on the very next page from you, right down the bottom is “Mum and Steve”, she seems to have a wedding dress on and there is a tattoo on her chest, its a very blurry picture, but there’s not doubt that it is a tattoo.
I hope they get back to you soon with a very good reason!
I came across another magazine article in this month’s French version of “Elle” which I found “uplifting” (no pun intended), and thought you may well do, too.
In Paris, from the 2nd October onwards, outside the Ministry of Health, Youth and Sports (14, avenue Duquesne, Paris-7th) there is a photographic exhibition of 8 beautiful, smiling women, aged 32 to 84, who are not hiding their operated breasts. The pictures were taken by the photographer, Florian Launette. He states, “The exposed pictures show not just poor victims, but desirable women. I photographed them for the sake of our mothers, sisters and companions.”
Can we envisage the same happening in this country?
Hi Poannie - sat in Costa Coffee for lunch today reading your article and my heart goes out to you and your lovely husband. So So wrong of them to alter your image - that is you and they have been very wrong.
Keep stong and positive and good luck for this week
I didn’t see your advert, but I recently had the same thing happen with a photo of my son in the local paper.
He had been to his Football end of season presentation night and Joey Barton (man City) player turned up to hand out awards.
A few lads had their photo taken in a group and my son was one of them.
He has a birthmark that is quiet dark and looks like a thumb print on his cheek, and in the paper it wasn’t there???
I phoned the paper to ask why they had airbrushed it out and there response was they hadn’t… they had to lighten the photo
so they thought that was why it hadn’t turned out. To my eyes the photo wasn’t dark anyway.