Nigel Barker Appreciated the Lack of Retouching in Kim Kardashian’s W Spread

The noted and lovely fashion photographer Nigel Barker ate breakfast with the press this morning to discuss his new book about being beautiful inside and out, Beauty Equation. Barker is a straight man who cares — and, perhaps more rarely, thinks — about female empowerment. As such, he's not a fan of plastic surgery or too much retouching, which is what made him like the nude W spread Kim Kardashian posed for and then complained about. "I thought it was daring of her. I thought she actually looked amazing, and I was surprised how little they retouched her," Barker told us. "I thought that was refreshing. I immediately thought, when I heard it, that I was going to check these out and they'd look like silk or something, and be retouched to oblivion. But, no, there she was, and you could see little goosebumps on her bottom, and all the rest of it. And I was like, 'Okay. Great.' It was cool. It's back to what photography is about — we're not trying to be animators. We're meant to be photographers. The fantasy should not be a computer game."