Several days later, Demarchelier returned to the studio to continue winnowing images for the show. The conversation turned to which shot to include of another well-known actress.

“I like her in this one, because she looks very natural,” Dangin said.

“Yes,” Demarchelier agreed. “In that other pose, she looks like an actress.”

“But she’s also very good here,” Dangin said, of a shot that showed her partially nude.

“Yes, she’s very beautiful in that position. Do you want to cut it?”

“No, no. I’m going to keep it for the ass,” Dangin said.

“Maybe we could redo the ass.”

“Yes, the ass is quite heavy.”

Later, Dangin retreated to his basement workroom to refine the pictures. He likes to retouch alone, late into the night. His work does not always involve riddance. “During this whole period of grunge,” he told me, “I used to spend hours deciding, Which is the cool wrinkle to leave?”

Pascal Dangin began his career as a shampoo boy in a no-name salon in Paris’s Fifteenth Arrondissement. “I was with girls a lot, so that’s always good when you’re a teen-age boy,” he said one day at his office. “But what was fascinating was that I had to learn someone’s life in a very short amount of time. Like, fifteen seconds to figure out, Where does she go and eat? What does she wear? Is she married? Imagining this whole life and then defining a style for the person. Hair, to me, is really one of the most important retouchings that you can do. Because I look at life as retouching. Makeup, clothes are just an accessorization of your being, they are just a transformation of what you want to look like.”

Little in Dangin’s early life suggested that he was bound for distinction, or anywhere other than the various small towns in Corsica where he lived with his family. His mother was a piano teacher, his stepfather a classical guitarist. Dangin had two sisters and a tumultuous, itinerant childhood, which he does not like to recall. He was indifferent to music (he still is). One happy memory: His grandfather had a small press, on which he produced an underground newsletter about village politics. Dangin liked to stick twigs onto the cylinders and print the negative image.

Dangin left home at the age of fourteen. Just as he was settling into salon work in Paris, he was drafted by the French Army. “I had just done a lingerie show, my first taste of fashion,” he recalled, “and then, three days later, at 6 A.M., I’m in the barrack in the dead of winter.” Miserable, he spent his free time immersed in a biography of Coco Chanel. “I can honestly say, without sounding too corny, that Chanel and her story helped me through this ordeal. I loved that a woman in the twenties, someone back then, was as defiant as that.”

After three months in the Army, Dangin obtained a discharge and returned to Paris, resuming his work as a hairdresser. Every day, he sat at Café Flore reading the International Herald Tribune, until he could puzzle out bits of English. The next stage of his picaresque was a move to America, in 1989. “I symbolically left in January,” he said. He took the first flight out of Paris on New Year’s Day.

Dangin had always loved machines—“I am a manual-laborer type of guy,” he says—and while doing hair for photo shoots in New York he became interested in the crossover between cameras and computers. He had a friend who had a Mac Quadra. “We had a deal where at night I could use his computer,” Dangin recalled. “I used to go to his studio at seven-thirty, disconnect his computer, put it in a tote bag, and walk six blocks to my apartment. I’d work all night long, learning programming, and then by 7 A.M. have to stop so that when he woke up his computer would be there.”

Eventually, Dangin got a computer of his own, a Toshiba laptop. Hanging around shoots, he would make suggestions to photographers about how they could change their angles or correct their colors. A few of them began asking him to ply his effects on their images. “I always said no,” Dangin recalled. “I was very secretive in my studio. I hated the simple fact that, unless I got really good, I would have to be there waiting like a chimpanzee for someone to say, ‘Make it darker over here.’ ” He continued to hone his techniques and, in 1993, finally accepted his first paid retouching job: splicing a curtain onto a rod for the cover of a window-hangings brochure. In 1995, he married Laura Tiozzo, a fashion editor. The next year, their daughter, Cecilia, was born, and Dangin opened Box. Dangin and Tiozzo divorced in 2004. Two years later, he married Sarah West, a British-born former photography agent whom he had hired to work for Box in London. “Oh, God, he’s looking for perfection,” Sarah recalled thinking, upon becoming romantically involved with Dangin. “But he definitely separates it. He doesn’t sit at the computer and think, Phwoar, I wish I could give her one.”

One night in April, Dangin agreed to show me his basement laboratory. He led the way down a flight of stairs, past rows of shelves stacked to the ceiling with books and back issues of every conceivable publication. Enormous data processors, encased in glass cubes, whirred in the distance, as though we’d landed in a NASA laboratory. As a habitat, it suited Dangin, whose presence in the industry—shadowy as, by necessity, it is—is regarded almost mythologically. “Many people are deeply suspicious of Pascal and his control,” Charlotte Cotton told me. Dennis Freedman elaborated: “Because he’s not playing the music necessarily as it’s written, not unlike a conductor who can be criticized for taking too much liberty with the material—there’s a difference, you know, between Boulez and von Karajan—there are those, though I disagree with them, who may feel that sometimes he’s toointerpretive.”

On our way down, a young woman approached Dangin, her arm outstretched to support a proof of an ad for a men’s cologne. “There’s no hair there,” Dangin told her, pointing to a raw, shiny spot on the model’s forearm. “Either add hair or burn it in.” (“Burning” refers to deepening the color and texture of a picture by exposing the paper to more light.) “Let’s get rid of the black spots on his chest”—freckles, as they’re known in nature—“and add a little to the jaw.”

Finally, we reached a cool concrete room with no windows. It was pitch-dark, except for the ambient light of monitors. (For eighty hours a week, these screens are Dangin’s exclusive visual stimuli.) “This is what we call Las Vegas, because it’s always the same weather, it’s always the same time,” he said. “It’s always seventy degrees. If it rain, shine, snow, we don’t know.”

Dangin took a seat in front of a triptych of computer screens, all running Photoshop. Clicking the mouse, he pulled up a layout: a series of elaborate fashion pictures featuring an actress with a movie coming out this spring. In one of them, the actress was standing on the roof of a skyscraper. Dangin clicked again, and the picture changed almost imperceptibly, like a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture game for kids. In the “after” version, Dangin explained, he had shuffled the buildings in the background and eliminated an unsightly valve on the roof’s ledge. The sky had been too yellowy, which made Dangin think of pollution. “I gave it some more white,” he said, “like a Boucher painting.”

He proceeded to a shot of the actress reclining on a divan in a diaphanous couture gown. “She looks too small, because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up, pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.

Next, Dangin moved the mouse so that the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. Ultimately, he had minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix.

“Her face is too high and elongated, mainly by the angle of the camera,” he said. “But I love her, too. I don’t want her to become someone else.” He zoomed in so that her eyeball was the size of a fifty-cent piece. “I love all of this little wrinkle”—laugh lines, staying put—“and the texture of skin. As you retouch skin, you can very quickly shift the tonal value. If you put a highlight where shadow used to be, you’re morphing the way the orbital socket is structured. It leads to a very generic look.” (Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest—higher, tighter—of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.)

In another shot, the actress stood in the middle of a busy city street, in front of a limestone building. Dangin blew up the segment of the screen that showed her feet, which were traversed with ropy blue veins. Click. Gone.

“There’s a little slumpiness, and the knees look really big,” he said, stroking a touch pad with a gray plastic stylus to contour the actress’s legs. Big knees. Small knees. Big knees. Small knees. He morphed them back and forth, as if viewing her in a fun-house mirror. The windows on the building seemed to have buckled, so he realigned their panes.

“Nothing is a problem and everything can be a problem,” he said.

Postproduction work is nothing new: by the eighteen-forties, less than twenty years after the invention of the permanent photograph, printmakers, using a mixture of pigment and gum arabic, were hand-tinting daguerreotypes to mimic painting. “There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries—we understand not less than £1 a day—in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation,” Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, the art historian and critic, noted in an essay in 1857.

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

“I think retouching is too much when it reaches the point of disfiguring,” Dangin said. “I want people to have an understanding of the skeleton and musculature and how it works. There is nothing worse than looking at an ankle or a calf that’s wrong. This is what bad retouching can do—you see in magazines girls having their legs slimmed and they no longer have tibias and femurs, and it’s weird.” William J. Mitchell’s book “The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era” offers some notable bloopers: the wife of a newspaper publisher in England insisted that the testicles be removed in a photograph of a prize bull, whereupon the bull’s owner sued for misrepresentation; the Orange County Register color-corrected a picture of a swimming pool that was supposed to illustrate a story about how vandals had dyed the water red. TV Guide was busted for grafting Oprah’s head onto Ann-Margret’s body—her husband noticed a familiar ring on the composite woman’s finger.

Dangin requires his artists to take in-house classes in anatomy and figure drawing; prospective hires must complete a fifty-six-question quiz covering everything from computer science to art history. Cheekbones, he said, are the classic locus of amateur flubs. “The minute you change this delicate balance of light and shadow, if you change by removing shadow because the girl has a lot of bad pores, suddenly this girl will look as if she has been Botoxed,” Dangin said. (The photographer Henry Peach Robinson concurred, writing, in 1896, “It is not, however, retouching in itself that is condemnable, but the bad retouching, at present almost universal, which turns the human face divine into a semblance of marble busts or, still worse, turnips or apple dumplings.”)