Dear Person I Went to High School/College With, Who I Added on Facebook During a Fit of Sociability and/or Irrational Insecurity About My Number Of Friends, But Now No Longer See Socially,
Hi! I see that you were out and about this weekend. You must have had a fantastic time, boy am I ever seething with jealousy right now! Seriously, I'm not kidding after all: you went to a house party. Congratulations. One minor point: you were there for five hours. Evidently they were a fun five hours as you photographed all of them. During those super fun five hours you saw the same thirty people. All your photos are of you posing with said thirty people. There are seventy of these photos. You are in at least sixty of them. None of the photographs depict a momentous or even humourous event. Call me crazy, you can even call me cynical if you really want to but your photos (all seventy of them, that is an awfully impressive number by the way - especially considering the static nature of the event and the number of people present) seem tailor made to demonstrate to the rest of the world what a brilliant time you were having. And it certainly looks like you were! Things certainly have changed, haven't they? I remember back when we were close, back in the days where we would both attend the same social events. I remember how you spent most of your evening collaring people to pose with you and the rest of it flicking through your digital camera deleting the pictures where you had four chins. Good to know that you've developed an all together more rational attitude.
Keep in touch!
Alex
ps. The little captions you add obsessively to every slitty eyed photo are just super too. "Drunk!!!!!! :)" - sheer poetry.
"Everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness." ~ Italo Calvino
I caught sight of the above quotation in the comments section for one of my favourite columnists and as well as being incredibly fitting it made me smile, hence the reproduction of it here. I am not a completely anti-photo person. I like photography. Photography took my thoroughly awful still life projects up to an A grade. Photography involves chemicals and silver and magic. It's art and it's science and nothing else combines my two favourite things so well. Photography I have no problem with. I have a problem with the endless streams of red faced people having "like, a totally amaaaaaazing time" that are clogging up my newsfeed. I hate that now whenever I go out I'm faced with the tyranny of the camera. I don't like photos of myself. I look dreadful in them: Because of the size of my pupils I will have red-eye even if everyone else in the photo survives unscathed, I also hate posing so am normally mid sentence when a photo is taken. (That sentence is usually "hurry up and take the fucking picture already".) My features are such that they're all slightly "off" my lip piercing is asymmetrical, but only slightly, my refusal to have five healthy teeth removed when there was no benefit other than a purely cosmetic one means that my teeth are out of line (actually technically it's my jaw) on the page this sounds awful. In motion my face works. I'm fine, average looking. Videos of myself do not make me cringe. Photographs however, unless they are black and white and completely candid look downright horrifying. But it's more than that, it's the fact that every time I start having a conversation someone inevitably collars me to pose for a photograph. I don't want to pose for a photograph. I want to continue discussing the decline in quality of modern British cinema. Just because every one else around me seems so determined to avoid having a good time by photographing it doesn't mean that I should be doing that too. I want to actually enjoy my evening without my conversations being interrupted by flash bulbs and I want to not be constantly panicking about the state of my eye make-up in case someone is prowling for snapshots. (Yes, I am that vain.) Is that too much to ask?
Apparently so. I blame facebook. I would attempt to rebel against it but then I wouldn't be able to stalk my ex's new girlfriend (photos: 941).
3 comments:
Whoof. Yeah, I know that feeling. Sometimes it is okay to put the goddamn camera down. And it seems with the advent of more powerful cameras in the hands of amateurs, the scarier-looking the results.
I am also on Facebook, but I will try to keep my e-stalking to a maximum of two sites at a time.
Thank you for the mini-reprive, sweetness. One day I will tell my famous "internet stalker" anecdote and then you'll understand. But feel free to e-stalk me in the blogsphere (and on Pajiba) as much as you wish!
I have a couple of friends who are seriously good photographers, they always manage to make me look half human. Are they the ones with cameras on nights out? Hell no. I've given up, I'm just going to avoid the camera and be happy with everyone assuming I habitually avoid all social occasions.
Randomly found your blog and there is only a small chance that what follows will come off as it is intended: just a 'for your information' because it happens to be the only thing that make me feel better about myself in photos. Also happens to my one of favourite pieces of random information:
Visual information is preferentially processed by your right hemisphere, which means anything in your left visual field is processed first and almost to the exclusion of your right visual field.
As the only way we look at ourselves is in the mirror, we focus on the left side of our face. To me (and you) the left side of the face is "you."
But when photographed, you don't see a mirror image of yourself, instead what your left visual field/right visual cortex focuses on is the wrong side of your face (the right).
So really, they probably aren't bad pictures- something reflected in the "good," "fine" and "not so bad" comments of your friends/family (ie. in my case they don't shudder with the same revulsion), because for them the right side of your face is you.
Bad photos partially result from you looking at the wrong side of your face...although I usually assume that this phenomenon accounts for the majority of my bad photos. Alternately, when this rationalization fails I avoid the pitfalls of being photographed by carrying the ubiquitous digital camera around myself.
Post a Comment