Putting Lipstick on a Pig . . .
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Some years ago, I was emailed by a man who wanted me to photograph a business property. He was a commercial real estate broker with a property to sell. He sent an image he had taken of a rundown business property in our area and wanted to know if we could photograph it. I called him, and we exchanged information. I said I had viewed the image he sent and was curious why he would spend money on getting an image of such a property, to which he replied, “I need a pro to take the image, and then put some lipstick on this pig.” I asked him what he meant. He said he wanted the property to look great and that our photographic ability plus considerable Photoshop editing skills could make winning images. He would be showing the images to a buyer out of state, and he might be able to make a sale on the strength of my images. He wanted me to be complicit in fraud! Once I heard this, there was no way I was having anything to do with such activities, but out of curiosity, I asked him what his budget was for this, and he said he had very limited funds and could only pay about one-fourth of my then day rate. Not only did he have the chutzpa to ask me to commit fraud, even though I wouldn’t have shot and altered the image for profit, he still had the gall to think I would be thrilled to do it at no profit! I hope everyone he called was willing to say no.
Now, I have been asked to enhance properties before, like the time the water truck broke down that was used to wet down a parking lot and I had to make a parking lot look wet for an image. I was also asked before to put two adjacent aerial images together of an airport my partner had taken, and make one photo out of them, and then extend the airport background to look like the drop-off behind the airport had been filled in, and a retaining wall added. This was sort of a photographer’s rendering of what the airport could look like if the airport hired my client to remodel the airport. Another time, a company hired me to take an older aerial image of a building they had built and update it to close to what the building looked like now with landscaping as they couldn’t get another aerial shot. I, of course, went to the building and did extensive work to make a realistic image of the building that I imagined from the air. This image was made into a large print, framed, and hung in the boardroom of the construction company.
In these images in the above paragraph, there was no attempt to defraud anyone. If anyone asks you to do something like this, make sure of what their intentions are. Ask questions. And if someone asks you to “Put lipstick on this pig,” run the other way as fast as you can.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
