Lena Dunham Recants Scathing Criticism Over Supposedly Retouched Magazine Cover
Image by Instagram
“Girls” star Lena Dunham has apologized for accusing Spanish magazine “Tentaciones” of heavily photoshopping a photo of her that it featured on their cover after the publication responded with proof that the photo was real.
“Tentaciones,” a monthly Spanish magazine published by Madrid’s “El País” newspaper, featured the photo of Dunham on the cover of their March issue. The licensed photo was acquired from a photoshoot done by Ruven Afanador for Entertainment weekly in 2013.
On February 29, Dunham posted a photo of the cover on her Instagram account with a scathing rebuke of the magazine’s supposed photoshopping blunder. Dunham’s post received 44,100 likes.
Yesterday, El País released an open letter on their website to address Dunham’s complaint, explaining that they received the licensed image from Corbis Agency and that the only edit made to the image was a crop to reformat the photo to fit their cover. They informed Dunham that the image was not only approved by photographer Ruven Afanador but even by Dunham’s own publicist. They also attached the uncropped version of the image, showing Dunham that they did not retouch her photo.
“Of course, we are aware that any media outlet needs to be responsible for what it publishes, but this photo was previously approved by the agency, the photographer and your publicist,” El País wrote in their public letter to Dunham, adding “Those who are familiar with and follow our magazine will know that we do not use Photoshop nor other digital tools to change the physical appearance of our cover stars, nor in the features to be found inside. On this occasion, the only thing we did was to crop the image to adapt it to the format of our front page.”
Dunham responded to El País’ letter on Instagram shortly after, reposting the uncropped image that they published in their letter. She thanked them for responding to her concern, apologized for her initial accusation, and continued to explain her general disapproval of photoshopping.
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