ashishpaliwal1993
Winston, Contemporary Photographic Practices Thus,…
Winston, Contemporary Photographic Practices
Thus, digital photography provides “increased power over the editing
process” (Strano, 2008). The Facebook profile picture is the most
prominent and explicit way in which an individual selects from many
photographs a single image that will serve as the “default photo” by which
they will be identified throughout the Facebook network (Hum et al.,
2011). The profile picture effectively “stands in for the user’s body in
[the] virtual environment” and consequently users are very conscious
about what identity they are projecting with their profile picture choice
(Strano, 2008). We rarely acknowledge that the selection and editing
processepitomized by the profile pictureshapes a photograph “into an
idealized image representing social norms about desirable personal
characteristics and socially accepted notions of family, gender romantic
relationships, and parenthood” (Strano, 2008). Facebook prompts users to
select images to represent themselves, and in doing so the site encourages
the projection of idealized identities.
Photographs are the most prominent way that users create idealized,
hoped-for, and largely pro-social identities on Facebook. Though users’
Facebook identities expressed through images can be distorted, in many
cases, users do not create deliberately falsified personalities. Sometimes
users craft their identities
as they view themselves
, which can differ from
who they really are
. To this end, photographs become an important tool of
self-expression. Other times, users provide a modified or incomplete
record of their identities by merely downplaying perceived negative
qualities and emphasizing perceived positive characteristics (Zhao, et al.,
2008). In online social networks where the online and offline lives of users
are not necessarily connected, users have the freedom to construct
whatever identities they want without having others refute the
falsifications. Alternatively, on sites like Facebook users’ freedoms of
self-presentation are constrained by their online connections to offline
friends, who act as deterrents for making obviously falsified self-claims.
However, users of Facebook can, and often do, get away with making
small modifications to their identities in order to present themselves in the
best possible light. In their analysis of 63 Facebook pages, it was found
that Facebook “served as a vehicle that empowered … users to produce
socially desirable identities that they were presumably not capable of
producing in the offline world” (Zhao, et al., 2008, 1819). Photographs
play a key role in this endeavor to portray oneself as more socially
desirable than one really is, without stretching the truth so far as to make
obviously false self-claims. Facebook users can choose only to upload
photographs of themselves engaging in pro-social behavior (such as
partying, playing sports, or hanging out with friends) such that their online
photographic identities exaggerate how social they are. Due to the
warranting principle, the observers assign significant credibility to images
as a partially other-generated non-manipulated testimony, even though,
invariably, images provide a distorted, exaggerated, or incomplete
portrayal of one’s identity.
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As a product of representing our identities online, we inform our
understanding of reality based on the images we see. However, given that
our online identities are frequently distortions, drawing information from
these identities often leads to distorted notions of reality. For example,
research shows that one’s Facebook profile picture affects one’s
“willingness to initiate friendships with the profile owner” (Nadkarni &
Hofmann, 2012, p. 247). This finding provides evidence that people draw
significant conclusions about the offline world from information provided
in online social networks. In another study it has been shown that
Facebook users are attracted to others that are perceived as similar to
themselves (Utz, 2010). Evidence of similarity presented in photographs
influences whether the user is considered attractive. Again, users take
information provided by online photographs and draw conclusions about
the identities of people in the offline world. Furthermore, Dr. Sonja Utz
(2010) finds that profile pictures of a user’s
friends
played a significant
role in how the
user
is perceived. Thus, on Facebook, one is known by the
company one keeps. In each of these studies, it is found that identities
projected through photographs (and viewed on Facebook) ultimately
contribute to one’s conception of reality; however, because the online
photographic self-presentations are subtly distorted at many levels from
the moment of capture until the photo is uploaded, the reality that is
gleaned from the distorted identities is itself distorted.
The distortion, however, is not limited simply to the realities of the
other. The reality of the self is prone to distortion as well. Photography
serves as an extension of our memories and consequently we rely on
photographs to remember and understand the pastboth of others and of
our own. Thus, as one’s memory becomes eroded over time, the photo
record of our lives that we keep online eventually grows to replace our
own recollections of personal history. As van Dijck writes, “[m]emories
are created just as much as they are recalled from photographs …
Research has shown that people are also easily seduced into creating false
memories of their pasts on the basis of unaltered
and
doctored pictures”
(van Dijck, 2008, p. 63). Experiments from the 1990s and early 2000s
found that 50 percent of subjects were induced to construct false memories
from old photographs that were retouched in order to depict a scene that
never actually occurred. It is still debated whether photographs or
narratives contribute more to triggering false memories, but regardless, it
is well established that “people’s autobiographical memories are prone to
either self-induced intervention or secret manipulation” at least in part by
photographs (van Dijck, 2008, p. 64). Therefore, photographs and the
technological processes that have evolved around images (such as
Facebook and camera phones) work to distort not only our view of
external realities, but also the realities of our own pasts.
Thus photography’s presencethough subtle at timeshas a
strong formative influence on our actions, our communication, our identity
construction, and our perception of realities, both of others and of
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ourselves. Compared to analog photographic practices, today we take
more pictures of a wider variety of subjects that have come to include the
everyday and the ordinary. In addition, the increasingly ubiquitous
presence of the camera influences our actions and prompts us to pursue
pro-photographic events. Though images have always been used as a form
of communicating and giving information, today due to technologies like
camera phones and Facebook that eliminate barriers of space and time, we
can communicate our images to a much broader audience than ever before.
A product of this facility of photographic communication, today we
increasingly rely on photographs to construct our identities compared to
the era of the analog image. Furthermore, we increasingly turn to online
images in order to inform our notions of reality. We look to our friends’
Facebook photos and form significant impressions about the identities and
lives of others, even though these identities are largely subtle distortions
and idealized version of the self. Moreover, due to the fallibility of human
memory the online photo record can gradually become the primary way by
which we remember our own lives. Our dependence on images to
communicate, construct identity, and understand reality is alarming given
the photograph’s tendency to distort.
There certainly have been drastic changes in the shift from analog
to digital image-making practices; however these changes have largely
been a magnification of analog photography’s communicative, identity-
forming, and reality-influencing qualities. The fundamental construction
of the image is roughly the same as it has been since the birth of
photography; it is only how we use photographs that has changed. It is for
this reason that the seemingly outdated criticisms of Barthes and Sontag
transcend technological advancements and can still be applied to today’s
photographic practices. Both critics recognize that the image is part of an
evolution by which we create, categorize, and organize information. But
this evolution of dealing with information, and photography’s role within
it, is far from settled. Sontag notes that in the nineteenth century it was
theorized that “everything in the world exists in order to end in a book.”
She contributes her 1970s perspective by adding that “everything exists to
end in a photograph” (1977, p. 24). Today, it seems as though everything
exists to end in a picture on Facebook. With the continued advancement of
technology surrounding photography, images are becoming ever more
embedded in our lives. In light of this trend, it has become important to
apply a critical lens to photography in order to understand the extent to
which the photograph distorts reality when it is used as a tool of
communication and identity construction.
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