Do You Pose For the Camera or the Mirror?

Picture-Taking, Misrepresentation, & Pausing the Archive

The Princess Diaries (2001), pre-makeover scene

A few months ago, I had my hair and makeup done professionally for the first time. It was for my boyfriend’s brother’s wedding - an occasion wherein I was meeting a lot of important family for the first time and needed to make a good impression. On the day of the ceremony, the bride graciously offered some close female guests, including me, access to a professional makeup artist and hair stylist.

A hotel ballroom was reserved specifically for the beauticians to set up shop. I arrived early, wanting to get ahead of the rush of women who would arrive after breakfast. The makeup artist sat me down in the chair and asked what kind of look I wanted. “Light, soft curls,” I told her. “And light makeup, maybe a wash of pink across the lid?” These days, I rarely venture too far off my trusty beauty routine’s path. I was hoping for an elevated version of the tinted moisturizer-cream blush-light gold shadow-mascara combo I’ve been rocking for the past five years.

The outcome couldn’t have been further from this. The foundation was visibly patchy, my blemishes exposed. The blush and eyeshadow were shades darker than what I would have typically chosen. My brow arch was raised, the hairs brushed down. The lips were overlined. My hair was parted too far to the right. The curls were tight, tiny coils that bounced when you pulled them back like a spring, crunchy with hairspray.

When the makeup artist asked what I thought, I told her it looked fantastic.

I collected my things and tiptoed out of the ballroom like I was a bomb that would explode if I moved too briskly. I passed some of the bridal party on my way out, who smiled and cooed pleasantries as I tried to flee the scene gracefully, all of us pretending that I didn’t look so unlike myself.

I donned a light smile as I glided into the elevator, nodding at passersby as I skated through the hallway. When I finally arrived at my hotel room, I assessed my face in the mirror. Is it really this bad, or am I overreacting? Is this how I’m supposed to look at a wedding? I took several selfies - one in the bathroom mirror, another with the front-facing camera in natural light. I tried to appraise which angle was worse - both photos were quite different, but equally bad. I sent the pictures in invisible ink to my boyfriend - who was occupied with last-minute wedding errands - asking if it was really as bad as I thought.

While I waited for his response, I looked in the mirror a little longer and started to wonder if maybe this is just what I look like. This thought isn’t totally rational - I know what I look like with what I deem good hair and makeup, and it’s not this. But maybe this heavy glam was ushering forward a kind of shadow self - what if, instead of wiping away the filter to see what you really look like, you had to add layers on? If I didn’t look satisfactory under layers of cream, color, and powder, what hope was there for me without all of the editing? I began to cry heavy, cakey tears, which felt so juvenile and looked so unappetizing that I began to laugh.

My boyfriend responded to my text, confirming that I did not look like myself, which I read with a sigh of relief. If I wanted, I could ask the makeup artist to redo my face, or just redo it myself, he suggested. I felt embarrassed - what if I saw the makeup artist in the hallway and she felt hurt by me erasing her handiwork? But then I remembered the photos that would be taken at this wedding, to be memorialized on Instagram and WhatsApp, and in frames on fireplace mantles. This was not a time for politeness. I switched on the shower and grabbed my cotton pads and micellar water.

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” c. 1665, Johannes Vermeer

There are few occasions as disorienting as not looking like yourself. Or not looking as though you think you should. I used to consider this a superficial qualm, one that people overly concerned with vanity experience. As I grow older and as technology allows for more contorted representations of ourselves, I realize that it relates less to beauty than I initially thought.

We, as individuals, only have representations of our likeness. We will never have an accurate assessment of what we look like, it will always be filtered through some kind of mediation - be it a mirror, an oil painting, or an iPhone picture. And so we try our hardest to capture the most savory representation and cling to that as the stone-hard truth. Chrissy, writer of Transtrender, similarly writes about “face-checking,” an “obsessive ritual of selfie-taking” that one engages in to get a sense of what one truly looks like. Chrissy writes about taking selfies with a lax, deadpan expression to discern what her face looks like at rest. Panicked by the outcome, she transitions into a light smize - raised eyebrows, soft smile, head slightly tilted. “PHEW. A little better. Spiral averted,” she writes.

Surprisingly, Instagram isn’t the app that initiated my compulsive face-checking; it was Snapchat. Snapchat is more intimate than Instagram - rather than broadcasting your face on a billboard, you’re hand-delivering it to someone’s mailbox. In high school, I didn’t go a day without wearing a full face of makeup, knowing that I would be sending pictures of my face to my friends and classmates all day long. Even if I was doing nothing more than sitting on the couch Sunday afternoon, catching up on a show, I was adorned. A pageant queen without her sash.

This strategy was a means of standardization. Naturally, your face varies on a day-to-day basis. The circles under your eyes grow darker and lighter. New zits sprout up and old ones fade. Brown freckles emerge and hide as you move in and out of the sun. Who’s to know what you look like under disparate bodily and weather conditions? In this lighting or from that angle? Cover it all in a sheet of paint, and at least you’ll know what to expect. My face was a stamp, whittled and carved and fired, like pottery in a kiln, to apply daily and reliably. To represent my truest self - a face orange with bronzer, skin smoothed, tongue sticking out. I felt most at home with my physical self when the Snapchat dog filter was layered on.

Growing up is realizing that adult women don’t actually wear that much makeup day-to-day. Few women are donning a chocolate smoky eye and Mac Candy Yum Yum at their desk jobs. So you adjust. It’s much easier this way. Much easier to dab on some concealer than to comb out your bottom lashes with an eyebrow brush at 6 AM. Only now, there is variance. I no longer have the stamp. The way I look in a picture varies day-to-day - hour-to-hour - based on the weather and angle and lighting, and where I’m at in my menstrual cycle. The representations of my face fluctuate dramatically. Who’s to know what I really look like?

Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Lately, I’ve been struggling to pose for pictures. Growing up on the internet forces a savviness surrounding personal branding - you learn your angles early. Today, I’m older and wiser and have released some of the pressure to let the watchful iPhone lens dictate my appearance.

But now, I’m out of practice. I’ve forgotten how to smile and hold myself in front of the camera. To avoid confronting this trivial problem, I’ve just stopped taking photos altogether, as if that’s some kind of statement. Whenever a group of friends offers me a “turn” at taking photos - on vacation, at weddings, at concerts, wherever - I refuse. But similar to the matter of “not looking like yourself,” I’m beginning to feel like it’s a problem less related to vanity and more related to misrepresentation.

It all came to a head last December at a concert for a certain blonde mega-pop singer-songwriter - the last stop on her behemoth world tour. I attended the concert with my two younger sisters, who are four and six years younger than me, respectively. My mom snapped pictures of us grinning in our matching T-shirts and sparkly skirts, the mammoth arena and stage acting as our backdrop.

I was in the immediate foreground of the photos, and my mom, bless her heart, is about six inches shorter than my sisters and me, and not a seasoned photographer. We reviewed the photos, and my sisters were satisfied, so we decided to sit down as people filed into their seats.

My sisters waited patiently for the opener, while I stared straight ahead, leg bouncing up and down, wondering, as I would later wonder at the wedding, if that is what I really look like. A younger me would have barged back into the aisle and shoved my iPhone back into my mom’s hands, posing, smiling, and spinning with a faux candidness, insistent on seizing the perfect image, causing a blockage in the aisle, people paused with their chicken fingers and White Claws, waiting for that mythical image to pacify me so they can get to their seats.

At a certain age, it becomes unreasonable to ask people to re-route around you while you have a five-minute photo-op in the aisle of a concert venue. So I sat, waiting for the grown-up clarity to wash over me, as it usually does. An intellectual clarity that reminds me that these are just photos, they are just representations of what I look like, they’re not how I actually appear.

But for the first time, that clarity didn’t reach me. I felt perturbed, disoriented. I remembered that this is why I don’t take pictures of myself anymore. Why my camera roll is waterlogged with photos of landscapes and street signs and meals I prepare, but my face is nowhere to be found.

Clueless (1995)

I sat, leg still shaking, and considered how much more time there would be until the opener came on. I also considered what I would show my children one day when they asked to see pictures of me in my twenties. If I cracked open my Snapchat memories, I would have plenty of images to show them of me as a teenager. I imagine them jeering at the dog filter as I tease my mom about her perm in her high school pictures. But when they ask about my early twenties, there will be a gap.

For so long, I thought that every life event necessitated a perfect photo and that every “perfect” photo of myself needed to be shared. In trying to undo the pressure to appear perfect online, I stopped taking photos of myself altogether, thinking that refusing pictures would release me from my state of constant self-surveillance, of constant face-checking in the front-facing camera. But, in doing so, I’ve also stopped creating an archive. I’ve paused the record-keeping for this precious period of my life. My thoughts and feelings from this time will live on through my writing, but what about my physical self?

Our physical selves are, of course, fleeting. Taking a photo is, for better or for worse, the most accurate and most readily available method we have to capture a representation of our likeness. Despite whatever complicated feelings I have about the representation, my likeness at this stage of my life, at all stages of my life, feels worth commemorating. Whether it’s shared publicly or reserved for my future self and future generations to see. And perhaps it’s not backward-minded to make sure that the representation is to my standard - a now reasonable standard, but a standard nonetheless.

A middle ground typically exists. In this case, it exists between wielding precise control over your image and pausing the archive altogether. I asked my sisters if we could take a few more pictures, and so we did, instructing my mom on how to angle the camera. At the wedding, I fixed my makeup and hair. A quick check in the camera roll and the mirror, and I was on my way. The pressure valve released, the archive resumed.

---