“Serial Gazes”
Presented at UVA GradCon: Networks, April 2022
On images and meaning and reduction to algorithms online.
Read it below:
“Photography allows us to break things up into abstracted images which then seem more real than the things themselves. In fact, reality is often felt to be inferior to its photographic image, with which we are constantly bombarded. Women in particular, I think, have suffered from photographic objectification. We have been pictured and posed in order to be formed by the artificial images of ourselves posing.” -Naomi Goldenberg, “Apocalypse in Everyday Life”
“No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in common language.” -Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
When I started this project, I was thinking a lot about my ex and spending a lot of time online. Every day I’d cycle through pictures of the time we’d spend together—me, drunk and grinning, holding Fruit Gushers; him, face covered by a cap, petting my childhood cat; the lake; the city; infinite, infinite selfies sent back and forth when we were apart. Then I’d scroll through Instagram, first my feed—friends, models, designer clothes—then my own profile, trying to maintain the cozy distance with which I consumed others’ posts, in an exercise of “seeing myself from the outside.” I was looking for something, oscillating between the lovable intimacy of photos taken by my ex and the curated heat of online content.
One picture, in particular, stood out to me. I’m sitting on a blanket in the park, legs folded over each other, smiling widely in the light of the late-in-the-day summer sunset. I’m looking just above the camera, beaming lovingly at the photographer, my ex-boyfriend. I look radiant and very much in love.
In truth, I was sad and starving in that photo. I loved the photographer insistently, that much was true—but our relationship had deteriorated over months of miscommunication, confusion, fear, and trauma. We weren’t often kind to each other, and we certainly weren’t kind to ourselves. But I loved the photo, because he took it, and because I looked good—I remembered my mom, looking at that picture, saying “it’s nice to see you looking so happy.” I thought I looked skinny.
What does happy look like? What does “looking good” look like? A picture can never tell a full story; As Barthes writes, images exist within a framework of cultural referents that may imply a static truth but in fact rely on the interpretation of visual tropes in order to communicate meaning. It’s because of the inherent ambiguity of the image that I could use the picture as a representation of a happy, smiley version of myself despite the truth of the moment it was taken. But how and where are these referents produced and communicated? I started to consider the nature of performance in my personal photographs: how I pose when I know someone is watching, and where I learned those poses; what I find worthy of photographing beyond myself and how I frame it; and, most of all, what I perform, what lineage I participate in, when I post these images online as part of a personal profile. What am I communicating to others about myself with these images? What is the boundary between “me” and the way I have learned to perform selfhood for an audience, whether external or internal? Is there a boundary at all?
What we see in media transforms the boundaries of our own subjectivity. I think of the work of Laura Mulvey, how we integrate representations of “life” in film or photography into our own ego ideal, like a child developing self-consciousness by (mis)recognizing their own reflection in a mirror; I think of the work of Raymond Williams, who argues that mass media is a “signifying system through which. . .social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored,” shaping us as we shape it. Regardless of the socio-psychic cause, film and photography play a role in determining how we understand our lives and identities; this understanding, in turn, leads us to reproduce certain visual tropes in our own lives in an attempt to connect to those “people” we see on the screen.
Today, we’re seeing more “people” than ever before. Our current media landscape exists as a near-constant inundation of imagery integrated neatly into our daily lives, a stream of photographs that represent and shape what we internalize as what “life” looks like. These images can be of our immediate, physical world—a friend at a party, a childhood pet—or are part of a new virtual landscape that is at once completely foreign to our “real life” and yet so ubiquitous as to become mundane when digested through the screen—Kylie Jenner pouting in front of a sports car, a pro athlete sweating in a sportswear ad, a politician walking determinedly down a hallway. And the line between the two is becoming ever-more blurred: today, an influencer will post a makeup-free selfie to prove they’re “just like us” while friends pose and edit photos to emulate the models they grew up seeing in magazines. As feminist media critic Carina Chocano writes, “social media has only normalized making a commodity-spectacle of oneself. . .people have a breezy facility with creating highly artificial images of themselves for online consumption, posing and lighting themselves as if advertising something.” We are learning, every day, to pose, post, and present ourselves within a new dialect of Internet visuality—we are our “profiles,” and our profiles exist in reference to a sea of online content that motivates certain tropes and self-presentations.
This content, meanwhile, isn’t displayed neutrally: while in the nascent years of online life there was a sense of the Internet as a great democratizer, we now know that the vast majority of online content is mediated through algorithms that collect, quantify, and redistribute our images in alliance with political or commercial interest. Machines guess which clothes we’ll want to buy, which Instagram accounts we’ll want to see, which dating app profiles we’ll find most attractive, and then build an online visual landscape tailor-made to our usage practices. But unlike our human visual system which is oriented around meaningful referents as tools for interpreting images, the algorithms that build our online landscape do not themselves “see” images the way we’d like to think they do. Computer vision is beholden to its training set—that is to say, it knows how to sort images based on the images it’s seen in the past. The biases of the programmer become the bias of the program, as when a computer neural network built by Bay Area-based programmers classes Manet’s “Olympia” alongside images of burritos. The danger, of course, is in the assumption that programs are better suited to recognizing patterns than we are—that there is a logic to the computers’ calculations that supersedes human understanding. I’m reminded of social theorist Naomi Goldenberg’s warning that we are culturally inclined to falsely assume artificial intelligence amounts to superior intelligence: policing and consumer research both rely heavily on computer vision, motivated by the notion of optimizing data analysis without human bias. While in the past our visual landscape may have been buoyed by oppressive cultural norms, ideology has a vice-grip on the algorithm that determines what we see today. Our visual world is being iterated by machines, and we’re all falling into a self-sustaining tunnel of our biases. If we become what we see, we’re becoming ourselves over, and over, and over again.
When I looked at that picture of me in the park, I wondered how many girls had posed just like I had: on a picnic blanket, legs crossed, smiling at the man they loved. With the Internet, I had the tools to find out. I put my image in a reverse image search engine, and the screen populated with pictures of young white women, grinning coyly, sitting outside. The compilation produced the stark awareness that the images through which I define my world are part of a broader visual culture rather than isolated instances of pure, unframed visual reality captured by a camera—and that our machines are amplifying and shifting the project of visual cultural production in real time. I presented the computer with images of myself, of my family, of crisis, of the mundane, and I was given hundreds of images, similar to my own and yet markedly unique. I made collages of the results, integrating my personal image into its place in the Internet’s infinite archive. For some, I tell the story of the origin image, providing some clues that force my photo’s specificity. Others I let drown in their algorithmically-determined family.
Each of these collages is inspired by the work of theorists engaging with questions of visual culture. “Dad of Daughters” presents in stark relief Marianne Hirsch’s argument that the family photo is a tool which at once displays and produces “imaginary cohesion,” highlighting how the tropes of family photography are leveraged to belie the complexity of parenthood and family unity. The computer’s failure to place my image within the conventions of family photography since the advent of my dad’s passing in “Family Photo 2020,” meanwhile, only reinforces Hirsch’s argument that the family photo relies on “stereotyped and coded characteristics” that reify the cohesion of certain forms of family and questions the role of family photography in maintaining family bonds. The Minneapolis protest collages play on Susan Sontag’s discussion of catastrophe imagery in Regarding the Pain of Others, displaying the strange dual consciousness of living through crisis in a media landscape wherein disaster imagery is leveraged as a rhetorical tool, where “awareness of suffering. . .is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view.” “Andy in my Room” and “Birthday Flowers” highlight Trevor Paglen’s discussion of the strange neurology of the algorithm, producing images that visually echo each other but whose subjects—massages, hospitals, 80’s living rooms, dining tables—are immediately recognizable to the human eye as misplaced in relation to their originals. And “Fist Up” prompts us to acknowledge the insidious nature of computer vision as a propagandistic tool, placing an image of protest in a flood of concert photography. “Park Picture,” which sparked this project, engages questions of the male gaze and performance of womanhood in the context of a heterosexual romantic relationship.
When I think back to that relationship, I think often of Mary Ann Doane’s discussion of the voyeur and their desire as requiring distance, of Mulvey’s notion of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of womanhood. And yet, I am also reminded of Rancière’s emancipated spectator, one who recognizes that “every spectator is already an actor in her own story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story”—I tell these photos’ stories as resistance to the reduction of the “gazed-at” to their object position. We’re more than theory, and our images are always more than a performance of cultural norms. It’s easy to say that I was “performing womanhood under the male gaze,” for instance, when my ex took that picture of me in the park; but it’s truer to say that I was being myself as best I knew how, having adopted certain behaviors aligned with the myriad identities that I hold—womanhood, whiteness, able-bodiedness, youth, beauty—while also balancing my own bodily limitations, emotional desires, impulses, in front of the camera of a man I loved. The way I pose for him isn’t how I pose for other men in my life; not how other women pose in front of a man’s camera, though they may echo each other. I’m as interested in the differences in these photos as I am in the similarities—our specificity clawing its way out of the flattened visual landscape, rupturing uniformity. The cognitive dissonance of knowing I am, at once, participating in a lineage of self-presentation in my imagery and also knowing that I have my own specificity, that I’m not those other women in the park, that they’re not me, is at the center of this project. Ultimately, this is a project that asks us to refuse the reduction of an image and, in turn, our selfhood, our stories, to their constituent parts, despite an ideologically-driven algorithm’s best efforts to create a visual landscape of flattened affect and serial personhood.
