Neither inept nor socially corrosive retouching began with Photoshop.

Indeed, if one considers how painters and illustrators distorted the presentation of human features — to flatter clients or to advance some notion of the ideal or simply because the artist or craftsman had never taken a good look at a human being — one realizes that images have been, in effect, retouched for as long as people have been making them.

Certainly viewers have had a greater propensity to unthinkingly treat retouched photographs as bald truths; but the lies were with us long before computer graphics.