MONDAY, JULY 14, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
PAGE 16
KC journalist's Photoshop project goes viral
Ester Honig's unmodified photo (left) was sent to designers around the world for her "Before & After" project, which was modified by countries like the Phillipines (right).
RILEY MORTENSEN
news@kansan.com
Esther Honig, a 24-year-old journalist living in Kansas City, Mo., had no idea what she was getting herself into when she first shared her "Before & After" project with Buzzfeed. Within a day of Buzzfeed's article there were 35 websites with their own version of the story, and Honig's email was flooded. Her Facebook and Twitter pages became so congested she had to stop using them because she couldn't keep up.
CONTRIBUTED BY ESTHER HONIG
Honig had hoped the Huffington Post might consider the piece, and her ultimate goal was a post in The Creators Project, a publication powered by the partnership of Intel and VICE. Honig had both her wishes granted, but she never expected her work to appear in over 150 major publications in less than two weeks.
Honig remembers thinking her first week of finals in college was as physically and mentally draining as her life could get, but experiencing this viral tidal wave has left finals week in the dust. Days of phone calls, interviews and hundreds of emails have left Honig ready to collapse.
Honig works at a Kansas City Internet start-up called uno and as a freelance reporter for KCUR-FM. She said the project was something she was doing in her spare time, but has been able to take time off her job since publishing the story.
her curiosity about how individual perspectives can affect how an image is Photoshopped and thought of the idea when she discovered Fiverr, a developing media platform that allows Photoshop jobs to be outsourced to individuals all over the world.
Before the media blitz of attention, Honig was simply pursuing
"I haven't been able to focus on anything else and I can't imagine a better excuse—a better situation—to say, I'm sorry, I went viral; I can't come into the office today," Honig said.
Honig said she believes society is fascinated with Photoshop and has come to accept the altered images we see on billboards. She also said she saw an opportunity to explore and understand this phenomenon by inserting herself into it.
"There's this new component and it's the flesh and blood of the person on the other end pulling from their own personal aesthetics and their concept of beauty," Honig said.
Honig contacted individuals of various skill levels in over 25 countries using Fiverr and asked them to Photoshop an image of herself.
"With a cost ranging from $5 to $30, and the hope that each designer will pull from their personal and cultural constructs of beauty to enhance an unaltered image, all I request is that they 'make me beautiful,' Honig wrote on her website.
The resulting collection of photographs took the Internet by storm and started conversations about technology, collaboration and global beauty standards.
Although responses to "Before & After" have been overwhelmingly positive, Honig has received some criticism for being published in women's magazines like Cosmopolitan and Elle.
Honig said she's heard several comments wondering if she strategically published her project in publications perpetuating the image she was trying to disrupt. To that idea, Honig responds that she wasn't trying to disrupt an image or concept in the first place.
The first person Honig went to with her idea was her sister Peregrine Honig, an artist also living in Kansas City, Mo. Peregrine immediately said yes and pushed her sister to pursue it.
"I knew clearly it had this potential
DEVELOPING THE PROJECT
to be incredible in its simplicity and its innocence," Peregrine said. "Some of the best ideas in the world are relatively simple."
Honig said if her sister had told her no, she probably would have dropped the idea right then and there.
Honig met with her sister on a number of occasions to look over the photos and talk about what they meant and how to conceptualize them.
"I had the hardest time understanding what it was because it's not a complete research." Honig said. "It's not making any sweeping conclusions or there's not a whole lot that it concretely represents or states."
Peregrine said she tried to coach her sister to think like an artist, and said Honig struggled with the fact that her academic training as a journalist had taught her to think there's always a beginning, middle and end, but that's not always the case with art.
From that point, the sisters agreed the project had to be open-ended and constantly in progress.
"You could only imagine the different reactions I would be getting if I said this is what global beauty looks like," Honig said.
GOING VIRAL
When Honig finished the project she posted it on her website, but kept it quiet and showed it to only a few people to ask what they thought about it and what media platform she should approach first.
At the suggestion of a friend from Los Angeles, she decided to submit it
to Buzzfeed, and she researched writers who had done stories on Photoshop before.
She was then put in contact with senior editor Ashley Perez, and from there the viral seed was planted when Perez published the story on June 25 at 2 p.m.
Within 30 minutes Honig received a call from Cosmopolitan wanting to run the story. For days after that, Honig opened her inbox every morning to hundreds of emails asking about the project. The original Buzzfeed article has had almost 2.5 million views in just two weeks.
Honig knew she had done something big when a friend in Chile messaged her to tell她she had seen "Before & After" all over the news. By then her project had reached countries all over the world including Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Italy.
There's an interesting concept behind going viral because it's something we don't understand, Honig said.
"I don't understand why this story was picked up for the life of me," Honig said. "I don't understand why so many people think it's so interesting because it's not polished, it's not finished."
Kansas City photographer Eg Schempf took the photo that has been sent around the world. He said he was just trying to take a fairly generic picture—not a portrait or glamour shot,
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