This is the third time today I have ended up at the new yorker... interesting.

Is that Apex in the themepic?

image is from the article. I assume it is Dangin

I hope this doesn't seem like the grandfatherly grousing of an "in my day" rant.
But there seems to be a subliminal feeling in articles similar to this, that the retouching "wheel" has just been invented. Extensive retouching, either on print or color transparency was alive and well looooong before photoshop.

I entered the field in 1955 and the man that hired me had been a retoucher since 1918. He had color samples that he had retouched for the war effort from 1942 and from the covers of fashion magazines before and after that date. The more extensive work was usually done by airbrushing and they were capable of surprisingly extensive retouching. In the years that I experienced, 1955 through 1996, I would estimate that more than 95% of all images used in major magazine advertising were retouched in some way and many were composites of multiple images.

This is not to minimize the talent of Mr Dangin, but to recognize that there are very probably thousands of retouchers with all the retouching talent of Dangin but lack the recognition usually because of the type of client they service.

The editorial magazines, in particular, love to create the illusion of panache usually by using the "in" photographer of the day and adding to the illusion in any way they can. Editorializing about their favorite, "none other like him/her retoucher" was another way. When I was in the field I had a friend who was the favorite retoucher of several of the Conde' Nast fashion magazines...but only on their black and white work.(?) This sort of thing was a boon for the retoucher and created a demand for his work that made little real sense...but it is the art field.

Ironically, in my experience, the retouchers that worked for the ad agencies, almost always without recognition because no one wated to talk about their product image being retouched, were the most talented and had the very least opportunity to gain prima donna status. No art director would put up with that very long.

Retouchers of Mr Dangin's genre always existed. They were particularly talented in their salesmaship as well as their retouching expertise and many of the editorial magazine editors ate it up.

I do love the New Yorker and this article is so typical of their "Manhatten is the world" thrust, but ya gotta love 'em, they're consistant.

I am not a fan of photo retouching. It seems very, very dishonest.
I applaud this guy's skill, don't get me wrong. He's a good 'shopper, for sure. But at what point do we just start accepting that the images we see in the media are totally faked? And what happens to the legitimacy of the media at that point?

Actually most of the retouching needed is not slimming or glamourizing people or celebs. Those are the less common jobs actually.
Much of the retouching is dealing with photography issues, like depth of field, removal of props and a host of very mundane jobs that are much easier and less expensive to deal with using the catch-all phrase of retouching. Steam is very difficult to deal with in photography...much easier and cheaper to add it later and control it's shape and amount. You can sometimes spend days on a very boring catalog assignment of simply silhouetting hundreds of items and adding shadows. This is the everyday sort of work in pre-press.

Fun jobs, like the contest entry ones done at Worth1000, are very rare assignments. You'd be very lucky to get a few of those a year.

Usually retouching is just there to clean up the picture generally. Retouching in the news media is a different animal altogether and eventually may require some alteration alert.