On Aug. 15, 1977, an issue of New York Magazine was released with an image of Jamaican singer and model Grace Jones on the cover: She is almost naked, standing on one very long leg; her oil-coated torso twisting to face the camera, with one hand lightly holding a microphone and the other effortlessly stretching out to touch her other leg, bent impossibly backward.

The image is one you've likely seen many times, but what you might not know (or remember) is that this photograph is impossible. It wasn't taken — it was constructed. Jones' husband at the time, French illustrator and designer Jean-Paul Goude, rearranged multiple negatives of the same photo to "correct" (his word) Jones' body and posture — a longer arm here, a little less stomach there — creating a perfect, exotic body. And he did it all by hand in the dark pre-Photoshop middle-ages, and repeated the technique with other portraits of Jones. In an interview with Vogue in 2011, Goude said he originally studied fine art but found it "more interesting to turn to publicity as a means of expression."

"Image-Makers" at 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo's Roppongi disctrict is a confused, scattershot exhibition looking at that turn. It includes the work of Goude and five others who also found it more interesting to veer from their original medium to other visual languages as a means of expression. At least, that's what the exhibition purports to be, according to director Helene Kelmachter's text printed on a freestanding wall near the ticket counter.