“I Filter My Photos... So What?”

"My name is Amy Odell, and I manipulate my Instagram posts. I have made sunsets pinker, my complexion clearer, and oceans bluer. I have removed people, objects, and  unsightly driveways. And I nearly always adjust images of my cat so she resembles something more than a mass of iron filings with eyes. Despite much of the world having retouching technology in their pockets, we’re quick to attack social-media users ‘caught’ altering their photos. Beyoncé went viral for apparently retouching her legs in Instagram photos. And travel blogger Amelia Liana was blasted for what looks like superimposed shots of herself at fabulous places (the Taj Mahal, London Bridge). This isn’t your typical Face-tuning, granted, but if these claims are true, what’s the difference? Whether you’re removing a sign or making your cat look more shapely, you’re creating an illusion.
Which is why exposing someone for Photoshop on Instagram is like exposing Foodhall for selling quinoa. Of course we retouch our Insta photos. When the app launched in 2010, the appeal was, in fact, its filters. I didn’t join right away. Back then, I was too busy friending former high school classmates on Facebook and Tweeting errant witticisms to worry about sharing photos. I thought, what kind of *sshole posts photos of herself for followers to behold? Turns out, the very same *sshole who posts anywhere else. In the spring of 2015, I caved and started using Instagram. Looking at photos was fun. So was accruing new Followers and Likes. Of course, that was all contingent on having photos to share, and I quickly discovered that my daily scenery wasn’t exactly the Maldives and that the only way to get great photos for Instagram was to take them while travelling.
A typical scene of my husband and me on vacation now involves me asking him to take photos of me, him complaining but doing it anyway, and me hating his shots and  making him take several more rounds before we agree that Instagram has made us all monsters. Then I lie in bed and edit the photos until they look more like the Maldives.
Instagram has set such an impossible bar for the beauty we are expected to exhibit in our daily lives that a lot of us wouldn’t dare post anything that wasn’t retouched or contrived. (This has also fuelled a welcome movement of sharing pics of stretch marks, cellulite, scars, fat rolls, and other shared features seldom seen in traditional media.)
But this is also why Amelia, travel blogger and controversy maker, is maybe a genius. Rather than endure the torture of air travel, she seems to have taken a giant shortcut. It’s not like other travel Insta influencers are sharing un-retouched photos. They, too, are editing the crap out of them. It would be easier on all of us if we could just slap  portraits of ourselves onto backgrounds of the Grand Canyon and call it a day. That would save us the staging, Face-tuning, and arguments with baes on beaches everywhere. And if we could all let one another tune our faces however we’d like, we’d have one less thing to drag women about. I’m still too sh*t at photo editing to
superimpose myself onto anything. But one day, it’s coming. And on that day, you better believe I’m living my #BestLife from one of the boats on Game of Thrones.”