Five: This Photo is Me

This photo is me because I am wearing my favourite comfortable, warm and dry coat, which is deeply unfashionable but which, according to an old friend, looks like it is made out of old pairs of 70s trousers, so I love it. I am also wearing no make up, have not slept for at least a day and have been dosing up on sugar for hours – I know this because I have just arrived in Amsterdam, out of shot I am dragging a purple case full of stuff. I’m saying something excitedly to my friends and am probably dirty and smelly. Also I am completely off centre. Yes. April

Over the past three years I have conducted several researches around the topics of identity and representation, which eventually crossed their patch with another subject of my interest: photography. As Susan Sontag writes in her famous collection of essays about photography: “Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as painters did) about what images were worth contemplating, because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything, photographers made seeing into a new kind of project: as if seeing itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness, could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find the world beautiful.” (Sontag S, 2005: 67). Photography’s claims to represent truth can be contested in many ways – there is no objective vision of mechanically reproduced picture, which early theorists of photography believed in, there is only an objective glaze of the person who chooses the composition, shutter speed and aperture. Then there’s problematic nature of social situation into which a camera is introduced: does any one ever really behave naturally while being photographed (unless they’re unaware of it)? Doesn’t the photographer just by the fact that he is present and in control of what will the final image be enforce certain vision on their subjects?

Photography originated as a mean of documenting more than an artistic expression. Yet as early as 1931 Walter Benjamin already observed that “reproduction of surface appearance” tells us little about actual circumstances of human functioning (after Wells L, 2004: 12). Photography in Benjamin’s terms records the ‘optical unconscious’ (after Welles L, 2004: 19). From sociological point of view however the unconscious (or sub-conscious) choices of what to represent on the picture are as telling as the conscious ones. Every photograph is at least a symbolic representation of author’s cultural capital and habitus, to use Bourdieu’s terms (Bourdieu P, 1989), through a inevitable choice of certain aesthetics. In some instances, and I argue this is the case with photographs of one’s self published on the Internet, a photograph also includes carefully selected symbols representing one’s tastes, sometimes believes, opinions, moral or political background and lifestyle choices, if we take into account that lifestyle “refers also to decisions taken and courses of action followed under conditions of severe material constraint; such lifestyle patterns may sometimes also involve the more or less deliberate rejection of more widely diffused forms of behavior and consumption” (Giddens A, 1991: 6).

In the reality of Internet every photographer (creator of visual representation) can reach an audience consisting of people they never personally met. Internet services that allow access to this audiences are user cantered and however it is possible to remain relatively anonymous more and more users decide to tie content they publish over Internet with quite personal information. The consequence of this state of affairs is that it becomes more and more important to the individual how the content of the photograph published represents them (Giddens A, 1992: 8). “It became clear” writes Susan Sontag, “that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform” (Sontag S, 2005: 68).

“This Photo is Me” was an experiment I conducted online in order to explore my own ideas about the issue of self-representation through digital photography. I asked all the Flickr users that are on my contact list to post one photo into a group pool. The rule was this was to be a photograph of themselves they believe to represent them best and the participants could only chose one. The decision on whether to further explain with additional notes why they chose certain picture demands explanation was left to the participants. I refer to it as “experiment“ because it is not (and does not claim to be) a legitimate sociological research: it would need more careful methodological examination to become one. However I believe some of the replies were extremely interesting and inspired me greatly during writing of the dissertation, which is why it became an integral part of this essay (text descriptions of the photos are included as chapter intros). “The assumption underlying all uses of photography, [is] that each photograph is a piece of the world” (Sontag S, 2005: 71).

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