Mom, Can You Delete That Photo of Me? Thoughts on the Curation of Photographs Online
My birthday is in February. For this year's occasion, my mom shared a photo of me on her Instagram. Happy birthday, she writes in the caption. #ilovemydaughter #happybirthday. My uncle wishes me a happy birthday in the comment section. So does an old co-worker of my mom’s, as well as some of my aunties, and my mom’s friends. I hit the like button. I like the comments, too, to express my thanks to my mom’s followers for wishing me a happy birthday.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like the photo. It’s not flattering at all. The angle is weird, and the photo is too overexposed, making my complexion appear paler than usual and my proportions are off. Later on, I asked my mother why she picked that particular photo. “It was the best one,” she said. “And I hardly have any good photos of you anyway.”
My dad also used to have a fair share of awful pictures of me on his feed. A couple of years ago, I asked them to archive them or delete them so I don’t have to see them, and more importantly, so others won’t see them, especially when they look at my tagged photos. The last thing I’d want is for acquaintances to come across weird angles of my face. What if their perception of me is altered? Worse, is this how I will be perceived for all eternity on the Internet when I will inevitably die someday, yet immortalized through my online presence on Instagram?
Why do I care so much? A part of me thinks I shouldn’t care too much about my virtual persona, or how I come across online. My mom loves me and loves celebrating me, which she does by posting a photo of me, taken during a happy moment, on a day that is all about me–posting me brings her joy. Besides, the inevitability of being perceived is central to human existence. To interact is to be perceived, so there is no point in fighting it. Yet, arguably there is more to my dislike of the way I am being portrayed on my parents’ Instagrams– it’s not how I see myself or how I see the version of me that exists online.
The “Me” in the photo
Who’s the “me” in the photo? Simply put, it's a version of me that I dislike. The version of me in my mom’s Instagram post is a pixelated version of me, one year ago, on a sunny day while going hiking. Looking back at the memory, I would argue that the memory behind the photo is a happy one: My parents and I went hiking on a beautiful spring day in Scotland. At the time, I was living there and my parents came over to visit me and I was very eager to show them around. While my parents were visiting, we had a lot of fun. I had missed them and they had missed me at home. In order to record this wonderful day, my mom took out her iPhone to snap a quick photo of me. Whether I like it or not, the photo that she took became a means through which my mom is able to preserve that particular moment.
According to Susan Sontag, who has written extensively on photography, images have the ability to replace the very memories they represent as they can aid in preserving and recording a particular moment. However, when recording a particular experience, the meaning of being present is altered. The compulsion to record and preserve has fundamentally altered the way we experience the world. Try going to a concert without recording anything, and experience it. Look around and see how many people are recording on their smartphones. Or holidays. When on vacation, I catch myself snapping thousands of photos that end up in my iCloud, though, unlike concert videos, I end up going back to the photos of being on holiday occasionally.
Photography is a tool that can fundamentally shape the way we see, understand, and remember the world. Yet, the camera can never be fully truthful–it tells lies. Photographs will never be more than approximations of reality. Sontag uses the metaphor of Plato’s Cave to describe a photograph. Photographs are the shadows in the cave, dancing on the walls, able to capture a moment but lacking in context. Thus, the camera becomes a tool that human beings can use to appropriate the world, turning reality into an object that can be collected, controlled, and consumed. When my mom took that photo of me, she used her iPhone’s camera to capture an approximate version of her reality in order to preserve a memory of us in Scotland. The pixelated, overexposed, disproportionate version of me is the shadow dancing on the wall, a mere shadow of the memory my mom and I share.
At the same time, there is something melancholic about this shadow version of me. It’s a happy photo of a happy moment, “candid” perhaps, but the photo is also a reminder of how fleeting life is. I no longer live in Scotland and my appearance has changed since then. The version of who I was, this shadow me on Instagram, is a reminder of who I no longer am, a confrontation with me-from-the-past, truly a shadow. By preserving and replacing living memories, we, intentionally or not, attempt to eternalize a particular moment, but by capturing it, we are simultaneously reminded of the transience of life.
When I look at older photos of myself I see someone who is familiar but it’s not me. It’s a photo of a version of me, at a certain point in time, in a certain place, taken by someone with a certain intent who wished to present me in a certain way. Meanwhile, as I registered that the camera was being pointed at me, I came to realize that I would be perceived and therefore, I would have to present myself and carry myself in a certain way. Thus, I pose for the photo. I, the object, am captured by the lens, and I aid the camera in its attempt to appropriate me –briefly I am the shadow dancing on the wall of the cave.
Posting “me” on the gram
Susan Sontag wrote On Photography well before the emergence of social media and Instagram. Since her writing, the popularity of photography has skyrocketed. Snapping a quick photo of anything. It is something I do every day with my smartphone, resulting in tens of thousands of photos in my iCloud (what do I do when I run out of iCloud storage space again?). We have a compulsion to take photos, but with the emergence of social media platforms, which allow us to post them on the Internet, comes a compulsion to also share the photos we have taken; platforms such as Instagram offer us a way to share our attempts at appropriating the reality that we have captured with the camera. By choosing what photos to share and what not to share, we continue to bend the reality-turned-object even more - fabricating or curating a version of the world.
At the same time, the technical design of such applications offers the users the tools to build an online or virtual self. On Instagram, this is by posting photos and videos. A post can be personalized even more by adding a caption, a song, a location, or more photos. A moment that’s been captured by the camera can now be shared and customized, taking reality and twisting it into a more controlled presentation of how we want our perceived reality to look - making it into an object to gaze at by the platform’s users.
If we consider the presupposition that the self is created in relation to others, the self becomes socially constructed. The virtual self is also a social construct, but the building blocks of online platforms such as Instagram allow users to “build” and “curate” a self. The camera is the tool that we use to curate an online self on Instagram, the app on which we share photos of moments that we want to preserve and record, to say we were there. The camera captures those moments and the ease with which we are able to record everything in our lives makes it possible to filter out what’s worthy of being uploaded on the Internet, and arguably, the virtual self becomes an idealized version of the offline self.
On the Internet, we are the architects, the artists, the curators of the virtual self. What do I want my virtual self to be like? I have never asked myself this question, but some of my tagged photos are not how I envisaged myself. Instagram’s features offer us more ways to control how we are being perceived, but others can also decide to post photos of us–like my mom posting a photo of me. It’s not how I want to see myself and not how I would present myself online or offline. I look too silly, a photo that seems too intimate to share on the Internet.
When I look at photos of myself online that I dislike, I delete them unless someone else has posted them on their social media accounts. This way, I am able to remain in control of my online image.
Online, we tell pixelated lies in an attempt to create virtual selves–attempts at appropriating reality, or bending reality in ways that we see fit. We try to be in control online, presenting a self that ticks the boxes of the perfect self. Prettier, edgier, cooler, etc. it’s all possible online.
Social media users have mastered the art of deception, and we all have all become reality-benders. My mom is a reality-bender like the rest of us, but my initial reaction to her photo shows a crack in my virtual persona (no matter how marginal my online presence, it’s still my curated Instagram). Ironically, the tagged photos section on Instagram is where our digital self becomes closer to our offline self - a self that cannot be fully captured by the camera as it’s multifaceted, ever-changing, creating in relation to others. But of course, it’s also possible to remove any tagged photo you dislike from your profile.
I have been contemplating asking my mom to delete the photo, or to make her Instagram private at the very least. While writing this piece, I realized that simply wasn’t necessary. I have grown to like that photo somewhat–it’s just a silly photo of me. How I will be perceived is out of my control, no matter how curated the digital self becomes. I could make it disappear from my own Instagram page any time. Still, I will ask my mom to keep her annual birthday posts for me limited to her Instagram stories next year.
