let’s talk photos, or: meditations on the selfie
A mantra I repeat in my advice to friends who want to board the online dating rollercoaster is that your photos can never be too good, and in all likelihood, they’re not good enough.
There are lots of dimensions of not-good-enoughness. There are technical deficiencies: photos poorly lit or underexposed, out of focus, photo of resolution too low to crop effectively. (Did you take your photos during golden hour? It’s a good idea..) There are physical deficiencies: you can be too short, too tall, too fat, skinny, bald, hair too aflutter, etc. Whatever.
You can address these problems the way I do: taking hundreds – or cumulatively thousands – of pictures until you get ones where the the interplay of light and shadow illuminates your stoic jaw in just the right way while your fat is simultaneously sucked in in a persuasively realistic way while you also somehow manage to have a facial expression that communicates neither manic insanity nor dire desperation. Oh, and hopefully your hair is falling in a flattering way.
It takes a couple clicks of the shutter to get it right.
If it weren’t already difficult enough to lose weight or regrow hair or gain a couple inches of height, there’s the even more irksome dimension of what the photos say by virtue of how they’re taken.
Of course what I’m getting at is our collective anxiety over the selfie. Lots of people express distaste for self-taken photographs, but they’re still ubiquitous in online dating profiles. They address a very real problem, which is that it can’t be intimidatingly hard to cultivate a photo of yourself where you really look your best (and it takes a lot of trial and error to get there) and it’s simultaneously embarrassing/uncomfortable to expose one’s insecurity by asking someone to help you take a bunch of photos of yourself.
I used highly trusted best friends for the delicate matter of playing dress-up and having them take photos of me in different poses, different locations, different facial expressions, but as I’ve been getting in shape and improving physically, I’ve wanted new subsequent rounds of photos and both the inconvenience of trying to rope someone into a photo shoot and the social awkwardness of exposing how vain I am (though I think I’m neither more or less vain than anyone else would be under the circumstances) means I’ve more or less abandoned asking friends for help.
Lots of people’s profiles specify they’re uninterested in dating those who have selfies up as their photos. Selfies that are perceived to be egregiously vain – based on what skin the subject is showing, the angle they’ve chosen, their facial expression – get mercilessly mocked on the internet. But make no mistake about it – everyone who’s sat down at the signup screen for an online dating website and built a profile has been conscious and deliberate in choosing the ways in which they’ll be shown.
The crime of the selfie is that the viewer is confronted with the unmistakable evidence of the self-conscious process of presentation management. Self-shot photos are contrived in such an immediately visible way, whereas even the most carefully curated set of images where it is physically impossible for the subject’s arm to have taken the photo doesn’t provoke a reaction.
We’re all vain – or at least those of us who realize how many other lines with well-baited hooks are sitting in the same sea we’re fishing in definitely are. The kind of vanity/insecurity on full display through the very notion of a self-shot photo is part of a whole suite of insecurities we all have to greater or lesser degrees.
But there’s no surer way to fail miserably in online dating than to lay your insecurities bare for all to see.
100 Problems 