Yalitza Aparicio admits photo was retouched but wasn’t bothered by it
by the El Reportero’s news services
The indigenous Mixtec actress nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Roma has set tongues wagging after she appeared in a photograph with a lighter than usual skin tone.
Yalitza Aparicio posted a photo to her social media accounts Monday in which she is holding a white Lenovo laptop as part of a campaign to promote the Chinese technology company.
But it was Aparicio’s pale skin rather than the laptop that grabbed the attention of many social media users.
Some said the lighting used for the photo had made her complexion appear much lighter than usual, while others argued that, in an act of blatant racism, her skin had been whitened digitally, with makeup, or by both.
“. . . They bleached Yalitza in this photo for Lenovo, the only things we should bleach are clothes and sheets,” one Twitter user wrote.
Nigorette, a fashion photographer and photography teacher, also said the image of Aparicio had been digitally manipulated to make her appear whiter, an act she said “breaks all professional ethics of [image] retouchers.”
The photographer told the newspaper Milenio that it was evident that a front light had been used for the photo but added that it was equally obvious that it had been digitally altered, pointing out that the skin tone on Aparicio’s hand didn’t match that of her face and that her hair had turned “almost gray.”
Nigorette explained: “It’s necessary to understand that skin is a reflective surface, and in that sense, if we want to represent a person as he or she is, we have to manipulate . . . the brightness in a way that [the person’s skin] recovers a little bit of its natural luminosity, tone and texture . . . The last thing we expect is for the media to fall into the typical error of racist ‘beautification.’”
In other Roma’s film news:
Roma star appears in video celebrating the ancestral beverage pulque
Yalitza Aparicio makes a short appearance in the promotional video
Although it’s not a prominent role, Academy Award nominee Yalitza Aparicio appears in a short musical clip shot as a promotional video for a community band in her hometown of Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca.
The indigenous actress who made her acting debut in Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma was approached last summer by José Manuel Cruz Velasco, director of the musical group Raíces de Tlaxiaco.
Cruz said he had known Aparicio and her sister Edith since they were young girls and that they always joined the workshops organized by the local House of Culture. “For that reason I wanted to invite her, and she supported us by appearing in the videoclip.”
At the time, Aparicio had just finished shooting Roma. Cruz recalled that Aparicio spoke about about her experience but “back then we had no idea of the impact she would have.”
Cruz’s project was to film a musical clip for his group’s Pulque Bendito song, which shifts between the band members — all children and teenagers — and scenes of a ceremony in honor of the maguey in which citizens of Tlaxiaco enjoy pulque, an ancestral beverage obtained through the fermentation of the plant’s sap.
Aparicio herself only appears near the beginning of the video as part of the maguey ceremony. Cruz explained that she had to leave soon after to travel to Mexico City where she received the news that Roma would premiere on August 30 at the Venice International Film Festival.
The Pulque Bendito video was posted to Raíces de Tlaxiaco’s YouTube channel on October 15, where it has earned close to 10,000 views.
Tlaxiaco is a city and municipality in the Mixteca region of the state, about 100 kilometers northwest of Oaxaca city.
Source: El Financiero (sp).
