I love a good telephone-photograph-self-portrait picture. Nothing makes my chin look longer and pointier than when I hold a telephone up above my head and force a smile. It's great.
Myself and Little Sister Edel (that one, up there, on the right) now have the same F*c*book profile photo, which is making the thread in which me and other members of my extended family shout insults at each other very difficult to follow, because some sections of it now look like I'm shouting at myself and calling myself retarded.
But that's beside the point. It also struck me that many other people on F*c*book have these same style of self-portrait photos as their ID photos and this is of course because nobody likes photos of themselves as taken by anyone else.
Either that, or the F*c*book ID photos fall roughly into two other categories:
1. Pictures of you and your boy/girlfriend, both of you grinning like morons; or
2. Pictures of you in fancy dress and/or pulling a face.
And that's it. I think in the summer there may be a spate of ID photos where people are standing in front of somewhere identifiably foreign, but these will fade away just as quickly as their disgusting flakey tanned skin.
I'm interested in why people choose particular photos for their F*c*book pages. What are they trying to say?
With the self-portrait, I think that just happens because you're simply not happy with any other photo posted by anyone else of you on the site, and so you have to take matters into your own hands, and keep snapping away until you get something which makes you look at least bareably human, if not at all like the person you imagine yourself to be. I never look like what I think I look like in photos. I have yet to take a picture in which my face isn't (in my opinion) contorted into the same kind of grimace race horses pull just after falling over a fence and giving themselves a break in the leg that they know in their heart spells the end for them.
The Couples Photo sends out another signal entirely. That one screams WE ARE SO HAPPY LOOK AT US WE ARE SO HAPPY, which of course makes me suspect that they are not. I have been guilty of this photo ID before, which happened coincidentally shortly after He Who Only... because F*c*book friends with one of his ex-girlfriends. I sobered up a few days later and removed it, of course, but then it made a reappearence when I in turn became friends with one of my ex-boyfriends (who is now married) and I needed stress HOW VERY HAPPY AND IN LOVE I AM, LOOK AT US, WE'RE SO GOOD TOGETHER.
The Kooky Photo is, of course, the last resort - you can't find a good photo of yourself, you either don't have a significant other (not that there's anything wrong with that) or your significant other is too ugly to photograph, you're balding and you don't want your school friends to find out, or you just want everyone to know that you're still as fun and fun loving and fun fun fun as you were 10 years ago when you were the life and soul of uni, and having a job, mortgage, kid and wife has done nothing to dampen your party spirit. And wearing an Elvis wig in a photo while winking and curling your lip will hide the pain of your haemorrhaging soul.
Or, you know, it's the only picture you have on your computer, and it's better than one of those stupid silhouettes with a question mark in it.
