It’s a real strange experience to find out what other people’s favorite pictures of you are. You get so focused on the right angle and how sharp your jaw is and if you look like you’re posing naturally. Your favorite is where you’re ethereal or otherworldly or just the best version of who you want to be.
But then your best friend says it’s the one where the two of you are looking at a flower, the one you hate because your arms look bad and your chin is one with your neck. And your sister likes the one of you in the car, asleep with your mouth open, with greasy hair. Your mom likes “all of them, sweetie” but she particularly likes any you smile in.
It’s strange because what we want to show the world - perfection, beauty, effortless picturesque moments - they’re not what our loved ones look for.
They like what they see because it’s usually the real you, the one they love, the ugly unkempt unposed one. They love that you get so excited about nature and that you fall asleep on every car trip. They love your joy, and the way real smiles look, the silly moments and unflattering angles and all of it.
For a long time this plagued me. I can’t fucking take a good picture of myself.
But the other day I was looking through photos of my friends; thinking about what I liked and they didn’t. I liked the one where, yeah, she wasn’t quite twisted to the camera - but there was this glint in her eye I’m so familiar with. The one where he’s blurry in the snow but his smile is obvious anyhow. The one where she’s dancing in her bathing suit, full of abandon. The ones where it’s the memory that matters; candids under out of focus fireworks, overexposed kisses, left-the-flash-on at the top of a mountain.
I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever love my friends less just because they post an ugly picture. They could post a million of them and I’d still be down to hang in the morning. The idea that I’ll somehow become disgusted with them just for an ugly selfie is silly, selfish. Shallow. And not gonna happen.
So how come I expect them to leave just because I don’t always photograph like the epitome of beauty.
Dean Harvey is the co-founder of Factory Furniture, the company that
created the Camden Bench, a piece of street furniture designed to stop anyone from using it for anything except sitting very briefly;
it is the nadir of the “Unpleasant Design” movement, a bizarre response
to rising homelessness and hostility to children in public spaces, in
which cities and private companies try to shove the problem out of sight
by making street furniture as inhospitable as possible.
In a CNN debate with anti-unpleasant-design architect James Furzer,
Harvey defends his practice, by simply defining all the things that
people without privilege want to do in public spaces as “anti-social”
and everything that makes life worse for those people as “pro-social.”
For example, he defends his “Serpentine bench” (designed to prevent
people from sleeping on it) and other anti-lie-down boobytraps by
saying that “I find it difficult to think why anyone would want to sleep
on a bench. It’s no place for anyone to spend the night.”
The whole piece is fascinating. It uses an undefined “general public” to
describe whose public space needs are legitimate, and excludes everyone
else from legitimacy. As many have pointed out, when affluent people
pitch tents on Sunset Boulevard to wait for Star Wars tickets, the
police don’t beat them up, arrest them and destroy their belongings. But
when homeless people pitch tents in the same spot so they have
somewhere to sleep, that’s what happens to them.
