Lena Dunham is known for rejecting the conventional expectations of what Hollywood thinks an actress should look like. It’s almost depressing to remember that, when Girls premiered on our screens in 2012, many viewers had never seen a nude woman on a TV show who wasn’t Hollywood-slim. Dunham has put out a clear body-positive message throughout her career, calling out fashion magazines for close-cropping pictures of Adele and urging women to accept their bodies as beautiful, with all their imperfections.
So it should come as no surprise that Dunham’s used her public platform to call out a Spanish magazine for excessively Photoshopping an image of her on its cover. The magazine, Tentaciones (a monthly supplement of the newspaper El Pais) had licensed a picture of Dunham taken by Colombian photographer Ruven Afanador. Taking to Instagram, Dunham reposted the magazine cover with a message explaining that although she was “genuinely honoured” to be on its cover, she wanted to make it clear that “this is NOT what my body has ever looked like or will ever look like – the magazine has done more than the average photoshop”.
Looking at the magazine cover, it’s clear some major digital manipulation has taken place. While all magazine covers do use Photoshop, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Dunham looks almost unrecognisable on the cover, like a computer-generated graphic of herself rather than the real (naturally beautiful) thing. Dunham signs off her post by quite rightly asking the question, “if you're into what I do, why not be honest with your readers?” We couldn’t agree more, Lena.
