Back when I was growing up in the 1960's, a columnist in the local newspaper was quoted as saying he didn't mind young men looking at the images of women in Playboy, "as long as they understand that it's not real life."

A lot has been said about how women are portrayed unrealistically in the media, and it's worth a reminder that the very real pain of that is experienced by women - and men - individually, every day, across the globe. And yet, despite pushback, it goes on, propelled largely but not solely by the extravagant sums of money to be made by pushing this vision of what we think women "should" look like.

Now that I'm all grown up, like a lot of photographers, I am a member of a photography club. Recently I attended a meeting in which photos were critiqued by a local photographer who certainly had the credentials to do so. And to be fair, I do not envy the judge's task, which is to rank and give feedback on some 80-plus images in the span of a couple of hours. It's exhausting, and they do so while 50 or so members in attendance judge them on how well they think the judge is judging their photos.

Anyway, up came a black and white panorama of a pleasant rural scene: a stand of woods stretching from edge to edge with a still pond in the foreground and and some painterly clouds above. It was the kind of scene most of us would wish to be in, and the panoramic format helped envelop me in the scene. My mind conjured the trills of songbirds and the call of a red tail hawk; I could smell the pine, feel the sun on my shoulders and the cool air coming off the water.

The judge struggled with describing his reaction, ultimately settling on the word "ordinary," though he admitted that wasn't quite what he was looking for. It led me to wonder just what we expect from our images. It's clearly no longer enough for them to depict a pleasant scene: they must wow us, overwhelm us with their color, stun us with the sharpness of their detail. So we are barraged with candy-colored landscapes of rarefied locales, be they inaccessible mountains or lavender covered fields where only the 'influencer' can play.

More damaging however, is how we scrub our images of anything we deem unpleasant: power lines and sign posts, trees which don't fit the composition, inconvenient structures which mar the pristine and the bucolic. With a few mouse clicks, we replace "boring" skies or turn yellowed grass to a beguiling, emerald green. If that's still not enough drama, it's easy to add a reflecting pool and give the image that last push over the top.

The harm, I have come to believe, is not dissimilar to what we do to our expectations of what women should look like, though in this case, there's no sentience to push back. (As far as we know.) In this latter case, I believe we may be trying to distract ourselves from what we are actually doing to our living environment. Perhaps, in the face of an overwhelming problem such as climate change, we can at least clean things up by removing those power lines which cross our view.

But the power lines are there. We put them there, and while they may be ugly, they are part of the cost for what we want, and when we erase that cost, we can delude ourselves into thinking it does not exist.

It's not just landscapes, of course. One friend had a rather intriguing photo of a staircase he took in a museum, and it was offered that he should erase (because it's so easy!) the security camera on the wall. But the security camera is there and it, does, in fact, mar an otherwise artful space.

The exit signs, smoke detectors, wifi hubs, telephone wires, cell phone towers, billboards, trash-filled dumpsters and abandoned buildings are the litter we have strewn across the landscape, and erasing them from our images isolates us from the consequences of our putting them there. Perhaps we owe it to ourselves, and to future generations, to not turn this kind of blind eye to the world as we have made it.