nothing i do is ever realistic and that is okay.
I feel really weirdly about real vs fake . objectively the difference makes sense , real is like the unedited morning photo with your candid messy hair and grainy shit quality lighting , fake is the full face of makeup slightly photoshopped jaw situation. sure. i understand the distinction.
but i love fake things and i don't want to feel ashamed of that anymore. i colour grade all my instagram posts. i add a shit ton of filters to make colours brighter or more faded because that is just my creative instinct , the raw version would have been nice, it also would have been boring.
and honestly fake vs real just feels like a meaningless social construct to me because it took like fifteen different conversations and collapsed them into one moral binary. nobody calls a film fake because it was colour graded but the second a girl edits a photo of herself it's like oh you're being deceptive or insecure or setting a bad standard or whatever.
the bad standard thing only really applies when you're talking about editing stuff in ways that make people feel bad about theirs. that's real and i get it. but that's not the same as editing a photo that still feels true to how you see yourself and the world around you, those got lumped together and now posting raw content is supposed to be like a moral act which is so strange to me.
my edited photos are not like something terrible it's just how i see things and it's not any less or more morally great i don't know why everything has to be some moral duty these days it stresses me out.