"I just feel like there must’ve been a time when the world had more, you know? Like mystery or something."

"And now you come somewhere like this, and it’s beautiful, and you take a picture, and then you realize that everybody’s taking that exact same picture from that exact same spot and you’ve just made some redundant content for stupid Instagram."

Said my favorite "White Lotus/Season 2" character, Portia, quoted in "How to Redeem Social Media in One Easy Step" by Margaret Renkl (NYT). 

Renkl bemoans the bane of social-media-driven photography:

My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations.... 

"Hunter’s pursuers say he has only himself to blame for his loss of privacy — that it was the same carelessness and disregard for the rules of conduct..."

"... that regular people follow that caused him to lose control of his digital life. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe he was addicted to danger itself, forever in an autoerotic dance with disaster. So many of the people who have peered into the laptop seem to think that it allows them to know Hunter Biden’s mind and motivations. But maybe that level of understanding is not possible, even for the man himself. He has been doing the same thing, looking at that face in the photographs, trying to turn it into art. He still doesn’t know where that Hunter was."

From the last paragraph of the long NY Magazine article, "The Sordid Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop/The most invasive data breach imaginable is a political scandal Democrats can’t just wish away."

About that art: "He spends his days making art in his garage.... He paints still lifes of flowers; portraits of Catholic martyrs; paintings of birds done in alcohol ink, which creates a ghostly effect. In one series, according to someone who has seen them, Biden has made a number of self-portraits, based on the photos in the tabloids, the ones that show him in the depths of his despair. The paintings are abstract, made up of colorful pixels, but you can still see the artist in there. He is planning to turn one image — a selfie that he took with a cigarette dangling from his mouth during a trip to Las Vegas, which now appears on the cover of Laptop From Hell — into a work in stained glass."

Here's that selfie he — the man who paints portraits of Catholic martyrs — is interpreting in stained glass:

The sunrise selfie.

This morning, at 6:35.

"PICTURED: Horrific injuries of selfie-taking US tourist, 23, who toppled into Mount Vesuvius as he tried to retrieve his phone when it fell into the volcano."

 Headline at The Daily Mail.

Philip Carroll, 23, of Maryland was hiking with family members on a forbidden trail up the notorious Mount Vesuvius/At the 4,000-foot summit he stopped to take a selfie to memorialize his achievement/Carroll lost his grip on his cellphone and it landed a few meters inside the lip of the crater....

'He tried to recover it, but slipped and slid a few meters into the crater. He managed to stop his fall, but at that point he was stuck.... He was very lucky. If he kept going, he would have plunged 300 meters into the crater.'...

There's something very grand about Vesuvius, and he didn't die, so we hear about it. But how many people a year die from falling while trying to "memorialize the achievement" of climbing to some high position by taking a selfie?

I think the typical selfie death fall involves turning your back to the edge of a precipice and then taking a step backward or leaning or posing and losing balance. But this was a case of dropping the phone and grabbing at it. Mega-stupid. But he doesn't even get a Darwin Award!

"According to a study published in October in the Journal of Travel Medicine, 379 people died while taking selfies from January 2008 to July 2021."

"Deaths have occurred after people tried to snap photos near dangerous animals, in front of waterfalls and while wielding dangerous weapons.... The average age of the people who died was 24, with the largest group under the age of 19. The most deaths, 100, occurred in India, while 39 people died in the United States and 33 died in Russia. Falls from high places were the primary cause of death, claiming 216 people. Another 123 deaths were transportation-related, the study found. Others died by drowning or injury from weapons, electricity or animals." 

 From "A 21-year-old hiker fell hundreds of feet to his death while taking a selfie: 'A very tragic accident'" (WaPo). Distance fallen: 700 feet.

The article quotes someone who did a study of selfies: "What worries me the most is that it is a preventable cause of death, If you’re just standing, simply taking it with a celebrity or something, that’s not harmful."

Oh, it depends on the celebrity. 

By the way, if you do stand on the edge of a cliff and slip and die, you'll at least give your loved ones sound footing to utter the cliché — as was done in the case reported at the link — you died doing what you loved. 

You will have died looking at your own face in your camera-phone — presumably, what you loved. Do you see the expression on your own face as you realize what has happened and where you are going? Do you hold onto the camera? Do you try to take another picture? It takes 6 seconds to fall 700 feet.

"Thirst trap."

You might have noticed the phrase "thirst trap" in the previous post. I have to start a new post because I don't want to sidetrack my own post, but there's a great and long Wikipedia article, "Thirst trap."

This is a slang term of recent origin — it's only about 10 years old — but somehow it has an entry as long as what you'd expect to find for a modestly significant historical character. I'm also recommending that you click through to see the one photograph, captioned "A woman taking a selfie." That's just perfect. 

To the text:

It's not the strict adherence to a plan... it's also the strict avoidance of trying to do it very well — 4 decades of rigorous anti-perfectionism.

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A post shared by The New Yorker (@newyorkermag)

ADDED: Here's the New Yorker article. Excerpt: "Her strain of snapshot conceptualism, profoundly personal and eminently personable, could have been overwhelmed with minutiae or weighed down by retrospective insight. Instead, with its light touch and searching, unsmiling star, the book breathes with open-ended nuance."

The NYT revives the old "Is it art?" debate for Plague Times: "a case can be made that quarantine nude selfies are art."

I'm reading "The Nude Selfie Is Now High Art/It has become an act of resilience in isolation, a way to seduce without touch" by the novelist Diana Spechler in the NYT.

Though the debate about art versus pornography has never been settled, a case can be made that quarantine nude selfies are art. 

Yes, but is it high art, as the headline asserts. This issue strikes me as nonsense. I don't even accept that nudes are pornography...

... nor do I accept that something is either pornography or art and can't be both. And I don't accept that something becomes more artistic because it's "an act of resilience in isolation." Routine masturbation could be called "an act of resilience in isolation."

Some of us finally have time to make art, and this is the art we are making: carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered. These aren’t garish below-the-belt shots under fluorescent lighting, a half-used roll of toilet paper in the background....

Wait. I think the edgy, gritty quality is more artistic. I think using a lot of bullshit — "carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered" — is banal and sentimental and less likely to qualify as art. It sounds as though Spechler is talking about people who are making a special effort to look pretty and using computer tools to flatter themselves. That's low art, at best. The headline promised high art.

I'm skipping over a lot of material, including talk of great painters (Goya, Van Gogh), because ultimately Spechler's own words undercut the argument. The naked selfies of the lockdown don't deserve (or need) elevation to the status of "high art." She says:

Though it might require a bit of squinting to see pandemic-era nude selfie-snapping on a par with Basquiat, geniuses hold no monopoly on the instinct to self-preserve. Or on the yearning to be witnessed. Sending a nude selfie is a request to be witnessed — not objectively, but through rose-tinted (or smooth-filtered) lenses....

That's just saying everyone has feelings and does some things that express those feelings. When is the evidence of an expression of feeling art? Is the product of routine masturbation — done as an act of resilience in isolation — an artwork?

Plenty of people are lonely, frustrated, and burdened with extra time. That's actually not the most profound feeling in the world. And "Look at me!!" is even less profound. It's not saying anything interesting or original. It's an expression. Fine.

"A daylong affair featuring popular singers, dancers and pounding music under a blazing sun, the 'Namaste Trump' rally was an unabashed homage to Mr. Trump."

"His name and image appeared on dozens of banners and billboards throughout the stadium and outside its grounds.... The event catered to Mr. Trump’s taste for a giant crowd. It also made vivid an image the leaders are jointly cultivating as larger-than-life, unapologetically brash figures leading their countries to bright new futures — even as their critics accuse both men of encouraging caustic nationalism and abuses against minorities.... Ahmedabad did not deliver the 10 million well-wishers that Mr. Trump has said Mr. Modi promised to turn out — television images suggested tens of thousands, not millions in the streets."

The NYT presents the Trump-in-India story, which it does not put at the top of the front page. The top story, in the NYT view, is the continuing spread of coronavirus.

By contrast, the Washington Post puts the Trump-in-India story at the top:

Clicking through on that headline, we get "Live updates: Trump touts $3 billion U.S.-India defense deal at massive rally with Modi." Sample text:

Following a 13-mile roadshow, President Trump arrived at Sardar Patel Stadium known as Motera stadium, to the cheers of more than a 100,000 people. Roads had a festive air with cut-outs of Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, flags of the two countries and colorful balloons. Onstage, Trump in a suit and neon yellow tie waved to crowds and hugged Modi. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was mobbed for selfies by excited spectators....

Abhishek Parihar, 18, a university student, heard about the event at a tutoring class and jumped at the chance to see the prime minister. “I am very excited to see Modi,” he said. And Trump? “Yes, him also,” said Parihar. Trump is a “very nice person and he was a successful businessman. And he is the best friend of Modi.”

"In [Peter] Berlin’s ideal world, we would abandon work and fulfill the horny needs of society."

"And to him, his image exemplifies what he believes to be our society’s sexual appetite. 'My wish didn’t come true that I would inspire people to the point where I see hundreds of Peter Berlins running around on the street. I don’t see one,' he says. In Berlin’s sexual utopia, we wouldn’t be 'desensitized' and 'robotic' but rather libidinous animals in tight white pants. When he looks at People’s 'Sexiest Man Alive,' he finds 'nothing hot about it,' he exclaims.... 'Who is a sex symbol for me?' he asks. 'There is none. There is only Peter Berlin … At one point I said to myself, "My God, I wish I would look like that," to my own picture.' He’d prefer that all of us believe the same about our own self-images, in a world of blatant sexuality."

From "Peter Berlin, Retired Gay Porn Star and Selfie Pioneer, Thinks You Work Too Much" (New York Magazine).

Here's his book "Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual."

Possibly the most embarrassingly air-headed WaPo headline ever. Maybe we should just look away...

But here it is: "Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?"

Smashed stereotypes... God help us. This is an idea for a column that should have been considered for 5 to 10 seconds and laid to rest.

Some text, to give you the idea:

The two are separated by race, gender and more than 100 years of history that forged an America that would probably be unrecognizable to Douglass. Still, experts say, their use of photography collapses the distance: Douglass sat for scores of pictures to normalize the idea of black excellence and equality, and Warren’s thousands of selfies with supporters could do the same for a female president.

This is like some nitwit celeb saying that Hollywood is reminiscent of a slave plantation.

When did everyone decide that the photo angle for a selfie was from the perspective of someone looking down on me?

Look, it's Joe Biden, doing what I think was once just a silly, vain thing for young women to do:



I know people look saggy and grumpy looking down into their phones. I was just commenting on that here, where a NYT photographer had captured people at a Biden event looking "dull and inert" in part because some were staring down into their iPhones.

But just because looking down is bad doesn't mean you've got to go to the opposite extreme. Traditionally, a portrait is done looking pretty much straight into the subject's eyes:



Seeing eye to eye is an expression that means agreement. (That expression probably first appeared in English in translations of the Bible: "For they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion" (Isaiah 52:8, King James Bible).) Isn't that sense of agreement — and equality and harmony — something a politician should want?

My screen capture of Joe Biden comes from a WaPo front-page teaser for "Trump says Biden ‘deserted’ Pennsylvania. In Scranton, he’s a ‘hometown boy.’" As the article points out, Biden's father — looking for better job opportunities — moved the family from Scranton to Wilmington, Delaware when young Joe was only 10. So it was kind of jerky for Trump to say to the crowd at yesterday's rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania last night, "Biden deserted you. I guess he was born here, but he left you, folks. He left you for another state."

Biden will be stressing his Pennsylvanianess, of course, over his Delawareness, because Pennsylvania is a big swing state and Delaware is a tiny blue state. And Trump will be antagonizing him on that subject: "This guy talks about ‘I know Scranton.’ Well, I know the places better. He left you for another state and he didn’t take care of you, because he didn’t take care of your jobs." That is, the question isn't where a candidate has his personal roots, but what did he do for the people of that place? Biden was a Senator and — aside from the fact that he represented Delaware — he was in a position for a long long time to push for policies that would help the people of the states he now needs to vote for him, and — as Trump puts it — "he didn’t take care of you, because he didn’t take care of your jobs."

Biden's father is responsible for the family's move. That's not on Biden. But Biden's father was in search of a job, and that's a basis for caring deeply about the loss of job opportunity in Pennsylvania. How did that motivate Biden as he lived out his political career? That's a good question, and it's not answered by going on about Biden being a Scranton guy at heart.

Haunted.

My favorite word in this sentence from "Ugly Beauty/Cindy Sherman's New Self-Portraits Are Her First Pure Protagonists: Gloriously, Catastrophically Themselves" (NYT):

After a number of high-profile relationships — with the Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, the artist Richard Prince and a 16-year marriage to the filmmaker Michel Auder that was haunted by his heroin use — she is now single, “except for my bird,” a 28-year-old macaw named Mr. Frieda, a superb mimic in his own right.

And they go tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet...

"bold, courageous, beautifying, radiant and captivating when there’s a story and based on a conversation that led up to it. It’s not just an image. It shows an element of trust."

A man rhapsodizes about the photo of a "full-frontal bare vulva" texted to him by his his 24-year-old girlfriend. Quoted in The New York Times in "The Selfie That Dares to Go There/Men are not the only ones texting pictures of their private parts."

Much of the article is about how to take a good "v-selfie":

“Snapchat filters banish blemish and razor bumps,” she said, adding that when she gets really fancy she uses Photoshop. “My mother is a photographer — lights and background are everything. Sometimes filters can make the ‘v’ look shaved even if it’s been two days and you’re stubbly. You want your ‘v’ to look good, so whatever light, filter, position will make your ‘v’ look best, that’s the one you should use. I use it as a narrative, as if you’re telling a story. It’s an aspect of that, it’s not just a vagina.”

I was going to say the use of "v" was a convenience for those who know the correct word is "vulva" but feel they ought to say "vagina" to fit in with those who don't.

Lexi Stout, 27 and the executive director at VSpot Medi Spa on Madison Avenue, which provides grooming services for the nether regions, has flashed her iPhone flora, stored in the cloud, to friends at a bar. “When I was in high school, if you had pubic hair, it was embarrassing,” Ms. Stout said....

“We’re in a generation full of people that want cosmetic improvements so they can share images,” [said adonna’s dermatologist Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank]. “I think the feeling of one’s sexuality is very much a center point of one’s image of themselves.”...

“I sit on the bed, prop the phone on a pillow and set the timer,” said [lingerie consultant Stephanie] Ms. Moreno, a petite brunette with large luminous brown eyes and tapered nails painted bright sapling-green. “It’s not just sexual, it has artistic merit and beauty. It’s sentimental and more intimate than sending my face.”

Later, a friend of the author's opines that if the woman doesn't include her face in the shot it looks "like leftovers at a cannibal dinner party."

The article descends into darkness with the discussion of women who don't "feel empowered" by taking and sending "v-selfies." A modest or revenge-porn averse woman is framed as a coward, "afraid to look at or experience their own intimate feminine beauty."

Nick, a 31-year-old software salesman and former Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq and the Republic of Georgia, brought up his girlfriend’s sexual inhibition to his PTSD therapist, who prescribed they take V-selfies over a mirror.

“She was very unsure of herself, very unconfident,” Nick said. “We didn’t have sex very often. It wasn’t something she was super-comfortable with, but I was in love with her. I was like, ‘O.K., well I guess I’ll find a way to make this no longer an issue.’”

A subsequent lover was far more overt, sending some images “including her face, which I thought was ambitious and I would advise against it, but yeah — she just wasn’t afraid.”

Wow! What happened between those last 2 paragraphs?! Did Nick dump the woman he loved because she didn't step up to the therapist-prescribed porn shoot?! Where's the #MeToo spirit now? Does it drop out of the picture whenever it interferes with some giddy theme of the joys of sex?

This article caused me to do an image search...



... I had to wonder what the hell is "sapling green," that color on the "tapered nails"?

"Is Acne Cool Now?/How celebrities and influencers are changing the stigma of having acne."

My favorite headline of the last few weeks... at the NYT. The column is by Andrea Cheng.

“I was ashamed of my acne because of the shame people would place on it,” [said Hailey Wait, an 18-year-old student]. Her acne affected her self-esteem, prompting her to raid the Walgreens makeup aisle for cover-ups, even if they did little but aggravate her skin condition.

Seven months ago, she had had enough, and instead of hiding behind cheap foundation or highly edited selfies, she did the opposite: She revealed her blemishes to her 15,000 followers on Instagram for the first time.

Here is the lovely, acne-proud Hailey Wait, in what I'm thinking of calling the best social-media influencing I have every seen — best and most beneficial:

Post Malone on repeat all week 🙌🏼

A post shared by Hailey Wait 🌙 (@pigss) on May 19, 2018 at 5:17pm PDT

So much of Instagram is women using way too much makeup. I love this leaning so far in the other direction.

And now, in the latest wrinkle, celebrities have joined the skin-positivity cause, with Justin Bieber (who recently posted on his Instagram Story that “pimples are in”), Kendall Jenner, Lili Reinhart, Lucy Hale and SZA openly embracing their acne.

It gets real and then it gets really funny. A sweet teenager does something cool and she's real and then the fake people jump on board. I'm real too!

An impromptu performance in an empty subway car that turns out not to be empty.

Please enjoy this fantastic video of my friend Stevie. It's one of my favorite things ever pic.twitter.com/gTDaioUtOR

— Dadam (@AdamBroud) March 12, 2018

ADDED: It's hard to see the other person. Here's a freeze frame:

This face just screams understanding pic.twitter.com/cfdT0Z3jIa

— Dadam (@AdamBroud) March 12, 2018

That time I didn't violate a rule but I also didn't "feel free."

I think this can be regarded as a photograph of the First Amendment concept known as "the chilling effect."

ADDED: This is why it's good for law to be negative. Let the government say what it's forbidding me to do. Don't tell me what I'm permitted to do. It gives the impression that I need affirmative permission for everything.

Delaware man — at an after-hours ugly-sweater party at a Philadelphia museum — posed for a selfie with a terra-cotta warrior statue and broke off and stole its thumb.

The sculpture was part of a temporary exhibit of 10 statues, on loan from China, where "[t]housands of the life-size statues, each unique" were buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, who died in 210 B.C., the NYT reports.

“We call on the American side to severely punish the person who committed this destruction and theft of mankind’s cultural heritage,” the unidentified [Chinese] official told the Beijing Youth Daily, a Communist Party affiliated newspaper, on Sunday.

After-hours ugly-sweater partiers were allowed to mingle with these statues?

The Franklin Institute said in a statement that a security contractor had not followed “standard closing procedures” the night of the party. “As a result of this incident, we have thoroughly reviewed our security protocol and procedures, and have taken appropriate action where needed,” it said, adding that it had cooperated with the F.B.I. Calling the theft “a deplorable act,” the institute said it would push “to ensure that justice for the individual responsible is served.”

You mean the individual who didn't secure the area or just the idiot from Delaware who behaved like a moron at an ugly-sweater party?

"The full-beat face has become the ubiquitous face of the Internet, a strange mirror of Kim Kardashian’s visage but also somehow just like Internet influencer Huda Kattan’s and Kylie Jenner’s, too."

"Instagram is awash in full-beat glory.... Save for variations in skin color and precise shade of shimmering eye shadow, the women all look uncannily the same. It’s the 'Instagram look'... 'When you take a picture, you lose the dimension on your face. The light will wash it away.' Over time, savvy ’Grammers realized that with a small mountain of makeup...  you could replace the shadows and the light... [You need] 'an elongated eye, lashes, contouring, bronzing, highlighting, and sculpting'... A theatrical set of drawn-on brows. And finally... a matte lip so overdrawn that it can look like an allergic reaction.... [T]he goal is to give yourself features you don’t actually possess: brighter, bigger eyes, a narrower, daintier nose, eyes so fringed in false lashes that they look as if they can’t possibly bear the weight. 'We’re a walking painting'..."

From "Brows, contour, lips, lashes: How the ‘full-beat face’ took over the Internet" (WaPo).

These things go in cycles. I can't believe that young people won't come to associate heavy makeup with the older generation and to rediscover the special attraction of looking natural while you have the gift of youth. As for older women, I can't believe they don't see themselves as garish and clownlike in heavy makeup. Yet if people don't live in the real world but only in photographs and video, then maybe stage makeup is where we will end up. In that case, the argument shouldn't be give up the horridly heavy makeup but: Return to living in the natural world.

I have a vague hope that the new generation will acquire an aversion to photography.

Or... here's an idea for one of my unwritten books. It's science fiction: It turns out actually to be true — as some seemingly ill-informed people have long believed — that photography steals a person's soul. These poor people who have been doing those ever more exaggerated "full-beat" faces in fact lost their souls a while back, perhaps somewhere around the 1,000th selfie.

"After a brief moment of existential crisis, Google’s question 'Is your portrait in a museum?' has the potential to bring people closer to great works of art."

"After all, I was linked to amazing individuals who sat for accomplished artists housed in major museums around the world. But is it really that effective? A quick review of social media confirms that the Twitterverse is weighing in on their art historical doppelgängers. Alas, the comments of the Twitter hive mind are rather superficial...."

From "Here’s My Problem With the Google Arts & Culture Face-Matching App" (Smithsonian).