Medium Specificity

Facebook Profile Pics

I wanted to look specifically at Facebook’s profile pictures, partially because I’ve never been quite content with my picture, and partially because I recently added a friend to Facebook whose profile picture is just a blank sheet. Where most photography is meant to capture a moment in time, profile pictures are specifically curated to make an impression. I talked to three different people about their profile pictures and why they chose them; one went out on a photoshoot specifically for a profile picture after his mission, another had gone through all their profile pictures to delete those he felt didn’t reflect who he identified as right now, and another took a more common approach, changing her photo whenever she found a more recent or more flattering photo.
Looking at the limitations and allowances of a profile picture, I found out you can actually set a gif as your pic. This surprised me since I’d never seen anyone who chose that; for some reason (maybe because moving profile pictures make the page too busy, maybe because it’s unknown feature) most people prefer to have a simple picture of themselves. I noticed many pictures (all three of the friends I used for this project) feature the person holding something or with someone else whose identity they closely tie to their own, as long as the picture remained simple enough to be instantly recognizable even when made extremely small.  Since to some degree we’re supposed to capture our entire person in one picture, including people or things important to us allows us to use the image (I would say photography, but Facebook allows for any jpeg, including jokes, fanart, and filters) to capture more about who we are than just our physical appearance. I noticed a lot of younger people are more likely to use selfies as their profile picture, and are more comfortable with openly accepting the staged quality of a picture.
I played a bit with photoshop, and considered photoshopping my friends profile pictures as a comment on their very deliberate selection, but failed miserably with the unfamiliar program. I also looked at different profile filters (including those responding to specific events; isn’t it interesting that we consider our reactions to tragedy critical to our identity. I’m thinking specifically of the French flag following the Paris attack.) but decided in the end that if I was going to ask my friends to change their profile for my project (even for a second) I didn’t want the change to imply anything that their original picture didn’t already. So instead I asked if I could paint their profile pictures and have them post. Even though I was trying to recreate the exact photo they already had, I know I’m not great at drawing, and no matter what I did it’d look different. Although the picture itself wasn’t changed, because of the medium (painting) the process of creation became so much more obvious to the viewers; a bit like seeing a selfie. I also became super self-conscious about the fact that haven’t painted anything in like three years and MAN IT SHOWS.