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> I'm surprised that I'm the first to offer a dissenting opinion from
> those who have been posting on this subject. It makes me wonder if the
> posts to date really do reflect the opinion of the vast majority of
> the list, or if those who are of a different opinion simply didn't
> want to be labeled a prude by responding.
I agree with David but didn't have time to respond to this earlier. I didn't see the calendar either, but I've read enough of the posts to get the gist of what's in it.
If I were interviewing someone who included something risqué in a portfolio, I would find red flags going up in my mind, but I would probably try to figure out why that person included it before I would close my mind entirely. Okay, so you're trying to show that you know Photoshop, and maybe this is the only thing you've done that was published, so you want to show it off. Show me some sort of before and after, then let me move on--quickly--so I can forget that I saw it.
Your description of what had been done to the photographs started doing this until the words "bruises" and "so they looked as perfect and delectable as succulent peaches ready to be bitten into". IMHO, that's where it crossed the line from a piece of graphic work into something sexual or possibly pornographic. I find that peaches phrase particularly offensive, especially for a portfolio. Now I'm faced not just with photographs that aren't particularly to my liking, but also with verbiage that makes me visualize things that I don't want to. I'm sorry, but I'm not prone to biting into "succulent" women, no matter how hot they look, and I prefer not to go there with my thinking.
If I read that phrase in your portfolio and ultimately hired you, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about those words and pictures whenever I saw you, and it would make me very uncomfortable around you. Call me a prude if you must or "sociopathically narrow-minded" to quote Dick Margulis (I can live with that!), but think of this--do you want people to think that way of you if they hire you? You could be setting yourself up for unwanted sexual harassment because there are people out there sick enough to think that you must "want it" if you showed them something like that calendar with that verbiage as a caption.
If you leave the calendar in, I would tone the copy down to a boring:
"As the designer, I created the calendar and generally
cleaned up the photographs of all of the models. This
included evening out skin tones and reshaping their bodies
digitally."
I'll admit to being quite conservative in my opinions. I'm sure I'm not alone (at the very least David and I are standing up together!). :-)
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