Gabriella

Cell Phone Photography Content Share (Class #15)

Often I’ll get a message from one of my best friends asking if I can edit something or someone out of a photo for them -- strangely, I’ve never edited facial features or bodies. I don’t really know how to use photoshop, I just use Procreate. Edits like these, for me, hold a sense of pride and shame. Pride because the works usually turns out pretty well & is believable; shame because sometimes I’m removing a person from the images. It raises a lot of questions for me about what should or shouldn’t be allowed when it comes to “post-production”, now that "we’re a species of editors” (Gergel, 2012). 

Looking at these videos reminds me that post-production bleeds into the every day. All three of these photos were posted to “personal" instagrams but (on reflection) these instagrams really aren’t just for personal use. For me and my friends pictured here, our profiles are used as a form of personal “branding” (which is gross to think about but...). We don’t have separate business profiles, and so these profiles help (1) me with art commissions, (2) Alex for dancing and fitness opportunities, and (3) Kiara for modeling. Now that a “good photo” is an asset, it seems weirdly normalized to make these kind of edits to ensure the photo portrays the message you want. As mentioned in Bourriaud: “It is a matter of seizing... all forms of everyday life, and making them function.” 

I think these sorts of practices have parallels to Edwoudt Boonstra, Anonymous series, 2009 (shown in the Gergel article), but more subtle — the removal is not to create a narrative, but to conceal one. 

Herein lies the ethical dilemma: as From Here On discusses, surveillance and a subject’s rights to an image are always up for debate. But if including people in photographs without their explicit consent is a moral violation, is excluding them? Does the subject have rights to the raw image -- and do those rights exist when you remove the subject entirely?

Though cliché to point to Black Mirror when talking about the dark side of social media (which now, seemingly, is all media), watching Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris talking about “human hacking” made me view one of my favorite episodes of all time from a different angle. Nosedive, for me, has always represented something key about our desire for “quantification” and validation, as Gilbert’s article suggests. 

Harari and Harris’ deep dive into the humans as “hackable animals” actually provided me with hope to one of the biggest things Nosedive made me consider: that craving validation is just how humans are. 

CW: Flashing Lights, Alcohol

This is the shadow on the wall. 

I got a Snapchat notification, “You have a memories from three years ago!” That is the first clip you see in the video above--hardly a memory, I can’t even remember what night this was. I continued to sift through my Snapchat memories from 2017-2019 and collect similar videos. There were more than I anticipated. 

I found the performance of the whole thing kind of startling--the “appearance of participation” (1). I don’t personally enjoy going to clubs that much. I usually come home with a cough from the smoke, I feel unsafe in crowds. It’s clear that these videos are just a “defense against anxiety” (2)--announcing: “yes I do go out”, “yes I do have fun”. This is not to say that I don’t go out, or that I don’t have fun--but more to point out this overwhelming desire to signal that I do. 

Looking at them, I do still feel overwhelming nostalgia, even though the videos are mostly nondescript and I can only remember their context based on the images around them. This is probably exacerbated by months of quarantine and social isolation. But the nostalgia is for something that wasn’t even real. The video where an obscure South African DJ is announced and everyone has their cameraphones raised to welcome him? I can’t name a single song of his. “100 shots at R1 each” from my gap year? I don’t think I even had two. 

All of these claim to be accurate representations of reality, but really they’re just clips of illness: “a compulsion to photograph” (3), the erotic self-indulgence of social performance.