Airbrushing - the only route to the perfect portrait?

I admit I was concerned by Alesha Dixon's recent channel 4 documentary in which she tried to find a publisher who was willing to put an un-airbrushed image of her on the front cover of a magazine. Needless to say most of the big names wouldn't return her calls and it was a fairly small (though apparently very brave) magazine that eventually published it. The thing is... it's not as if Alesha takes a bad photo - or as if she wasn't happy to have her hair, makeup and styling done by top notch pro's. Quite the opposite. So why was it such a struggle to find a cooperative publisher?

The problem lies in our association between magazines and the 'truth'. We group them with newspapers and other 'factual' publications; when really they tread a fine line between fact and fiction. Hence the airbrushing debate rages on. Popular media is not a million miles away from more traditional art forms, in which the subjectivity of 'beauty' is often happily and uncontroversially depicted. The scornful gallery favourite 'my kid could have done that' is almost exclusively negative; the general consensus is that art should be unique, subversive, and often impossible in one way or another. Likewise we'd prefer not to see ourselves, or images like ourselves, reflected all around us. We desire our magazine covers to be stunning, just like our wall hangings.

A friend of mine has just completed work experience with a London-based fashion photographer, during which a size eight model was branded too big from the waist down. The photographer, also a size 8, remarked that she didn't want to see images of herself when she bought fashion magazines. She wanted to see perfection, albeit a largely impossible perfection. It may be twisted that images of 'reality' are becoming increasingly unrealistic, but I don't see the trend reversing any time soon.

So - can we only take a perfect portrait if the subject represents human perfection? I don't think so. Like all successful images, a perfect portrait represents its subject accurately, subversively, controversially, or however the brief or personal aims dictate - either that or it's a shot in the dark that happens to work brilliantly - with or without supermodels and oodles of post production work. That said, a commercial shot may benefit from them: someone's obviously buying the magazines.