Since I posted a blog post, and an accompanying note on Facebook, about how Facebook pictures shape the way we look at ourselves and others, I’ve been thinking on and off about how photographs shape our experience of life.
For example, how much of what we remember of people’s faces is a product not of what we see of them in the flesh but of the pictures we see of them?
I don’t know whether I’m unusual in this regard, but I sometimes have trouble calling up an mental image of someone’s face. I can sometimes more easily come up with a verbal description of a face than see it in my mind’s eye.
And when I do see a face in my mind’s eye, more often than not it is an image of face from a photograph I’ve seen of the face than an image of face I’ve seen before me.
It strikes me that this is because we rarely look hard at the people before us and take in their faces. Staring, after all, is rude. But we do often stare for a long time at a photograph of a person. And so it is the photography we remember more than the impression we have of someone before us.
There are, however, times when an image that sticks with me of a person’s face does come from “real life.” Most often it’s when I saw a person with an unusual or striking expression.
A few years ago when I ran for Council I was walking down Broad Street in a fairly hard rain with my head down and under an umbrella. A good friend, who I had talked to on the phone about a half hour before, tapped my umbrella and I looked up and very briefly saw her. And it is the face I saw at the moment that sticks in my mind when I think of her. I suspect it is because, at that moment, I saw someone who I had recently seen troubled or angry standing before me with a beautiful smile that was serene and joyous and with just a hint of an impish grin for having made me look up into the rain. Maybe that’s the face I always see in my mind’s eye because I want to imagine her always in that sweet mood.
More often, however, it is pictures of people that come to mind. And I find that when I’ve seen people in pictures long before I’ve met them, even when they are before me I see the picture as much or more than the person before me.
Not long ago I had a drink and a bite to eat with someone who I’ve been emailing for a while. I had met her once before, for just a few minutes months ago. But I’ve seen her pictures on Facebook.
And unlike the Facebook pictures I’ve complained about before, her pictures are pretty good. She almost always looks good—the adjectives pretty and vivacious come to mind–and has a face with a clearly defined shape.
And that’s how I pictured her. It was only after sitting in front of her for about an hour and a half that all of a sudden I realized how different she looked in person. Her face was far more varied and animated and spirited than the faces I saw in the mostly posed pictures. And she was far better looking than I had realized. Now the only adjective that came to mind was beautiful. It was as though I couldn’t see through the picture of her I had in my mind’s eye, a picture that came from Facebook photos, and really see how attractive she was.
I’m not sure what to make of all this. I said before that all the bad pictures of us on Facebook are going to make us look better in person when people actually meet us. Now I’m worried that it is harder to overcome those bad pictures of Facebook than I had thought. Or maybe the really bad ones will not be hard for people to break through but the other pictures of us on Facebook—the so-so ones—are going to shape the impressions people have of us.
Perhaps the best way to avoid being “typecast” is to make sure there are lots of pictures of us on Facebook, some posed, some not, with a variety of expressions of all kinds. (I definitely recommend not doing what another friend does. She has posted a whole series of posed photographs from her travels around the world. But in every one, she has exactly the same expression on her face. She has a lovely smile, but after seeing it in so many different places, one begins to wonder about her. It is as if she were the anti-Zelig who is never moved or changed by her circumstances in the slightest.)
I posted some old pictures on Facebook about six months ago when a group of friends were making a joke about my hair and asked to see what I looked like twenty years ago. That easiest way to accommodate the whole group was to make the pictures available to them on Facebook. I had forgotten about those pictures until recently and was going to take them down.
Now I think I’m just going to leave them up, if only so people who check me out on Facebook before meeting me don’t quite know what to expect.
Will my hair be grey or brown, long or short? Will I have a beard or not? You are just going to have to meet me to find out!