On Manipulation

I am intrigued and confused to see, very often, the profile photographs of many friends on social networks. Faces that I struggle to recognize.

Photography when it was born was an esoteric and elitist tool, only for a few equipped with cameras and rolls. Then the advent of digital has transformed photography into a more collective and exoteric way of sharing images, ideas and visions, but still always for people who can afford cameras and lenses that are often very expensive.

However, we did not stop here. The new phones have annihilated every esoteric-exoteric aura forever. Now photos are within everyone's reach. Not only this, now even the apps and the small editing programs can be used without the need of years of practice on Photoshop or Lightroom. And here by magic, the faces become long-limbed, thin, very white and asphalted skins to remove every little wrinkle, also removing the natural lines of our faces.

Pursuing the dream of seeing—at least in image—the ideal projection of our faces and bodies, a manipulated "selfie" is more for ourselves than for others. Certainly this is not the same artistic meaning of the ante litteram "selfies" by Vivian Maier, a photographer who, if she lived in our days, perhaps would have made a lot of selfies. But her selfies was still an artistic search. Today, we are closer to psychoanalysis magic than photographic theory. 

It's impossible not to think of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, an icon of someone who sacrifices his soul to the devil to save his real face in eternal beauty, condemning his painted image to deteriorate and grow old. Time is always the factor that moves all our fears, as Italo Zannier well writes in his essay "The lantern of photography - From the invisible to the unknown" (La nave di Teseo, 2017):

"Photofunia, or photo- apparition, the current technique for which images live on mobile phones or computers, but they cease to exist as soon as the instrument switched off, if they are not printed on a material support”.

We exist in the space of our online appearances, trying to buffer the temporal voids that terrify us with continuous images of our manipulated faces, eternally young and thin, with no sign of the passing time, like a Dorian Gray on the contrary: let our real faces to age and our body to gain weight, as long as our images show us to others in all our hallucinated idea of beauty.  Not like Vivian's portraits on shop windows, but like many fragiles and compulsives Dorian Gray.

Long live photography! Long live cell phones! Now we are truly eternal and splendid, even if only for the time when our phones and computers are turned on.

"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose?" (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde)

Italian Version

"Self-portrait", New York 1952-59 (c)Vivian Maier