how to tame a dog with a crocodile smile
B-Lines, speculative documentary and how we watch ourselves
When I was in Year 7, everybody had to have a photo taken for a new orange B-Line card which could be used as both an ID for a 12-14 year old and a discount on shopping and buses; I had straightened blonde hair, a massive head and a wonky smile, which I still have now. When it was my turn to have my photo taken, I smiled as I usually would with my lips together, not showing any sign of my wonky teeth or smile. However, the photographer asked me to show my teeth and reluctantly, I agreed. The flash bulb went off and a couple of weeks later, I received my B-Line at school. Of all the photos he’d taken, he chose the one I liked least, the one which showed my wonky smile. Although it was my ID, I had no choice over which photo was going to be used.
Despite my negative feelings about the photo at the time, I’m not as happy as I thought I’d be about never seeing that photo again; it’s trivial but it showed me as I was at the time, documenting my extreme need to be seen a particular way through my carefully straightened, washed hair and my reluctance to grin. Remembering it makes me realise the same fear I had then when I went to show my teeth is one I share now; the simultaneous need to be seen, and to be hidden.
Although the fear has morphed and shape-shifted, it has, like my wonky smile, stayed vaguely persistent. The ways we view ourselves have been exacerbated through the methods we have to view ourselves now, not just physically but mentally. We are bothered about how we are seen through our clothes, our hair, our homes to how we are seen mentally through ideas and narratives we may tell about ourselves; this can result in absolute apathy in the ways you are seen as a means of appearing unbothered by it or an excess of importance placed on the things you consume and the way you are seen through those things. Apathetic people may think they’re better than those with this excess but regardless, they both arise from the same place, the same fear of being seen and watched.
The reason I like the memory of that Year 7 photograph now is become it seems like evidence; it doesn’t use atmospheric lighting nor a scenic backdrop nor does it share the same romantic camcorder aesthetics of my childhood. It is as concrete and sterile as a forensic photograph used in criminal investigations, it’s aesthetics evidenced even more when young people go missing; more often than not these photographs are used to identify them on the news, serving as a way of seeing them in a concrete way, not as a whole person but something made up of distinguishable features.
These kind of photographs show very little inclination towards feeling for me, which is why it was surprising the photographer felt such a want to ask me to show some of my teeth. The use of the flash to ‘evidence’ something reminds me of Max Pinckers’ practice. Pinckers is a photographer I followed for a few years since I first saw his work at FORMAT Festival at Quad Derby. At the time, he was exhibiting some of his work from Margins of Excess:
“In Margins of Excess the notion of how personal imagination conflicts with generally accepted beliefs is expressed through the narratives of six individuals. Every one of them momentarily received nationwide attention in the US press because of their attempts to realise a dream or passion, but were presented as frauds or deceivers by the mass media’s apparent incapacity to deal with idiosyncratic versions of reality.”
There was one photo in particular that stood out to me in the series because I think, I felt perhaps, that it was real. It was this photo below:
It’s only now, after reading more of Pinckers’ written work, that I realise why it ‘felt’ real:
We are being observed just as much as we are observing, seeing reflections of ourselves within those same reactions to the events or perhaps a crafted version of ourselves to see how we ‘should’ feel. Even in the carefully constructed composition, the familiar tropes Pinckers uses puncture your processing of an image so far down to your gut you can barely think about whether it’s true or false, reality or fiction. This brings up for me, more than anything, of who is the authority over how we feel about something? Who is the authority in how we see ourselves?
Stock photography has a plainness to it that doesn’t have any feeling involved; it is used by businesses or kept watermarked in student presentations at school. They are used as vehicles to accommodate something else, an image used to exacerbate feelings that are already present, like a violin playing atop a sad breakup scene in a film. Alone, however, they are funny in their compositions; people are positioned in such a sterile way, it is almost instructional in the way we should act about things depending on the content. It’s poor quality is almost laughable, ascending into meme culture now, but also in relation to artist Hito Steyerl’s exploration of image distribution through her piece, In Defence of the Poor Image:
Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.
If something is of a worse quality, we seem less likely to believe it; the distribution of UFO photos is a clear example of this. UFO photography is often known to be blurry, dark and shares little to no elements of the flashiness of photojournalism; as a result, we tend to believe it less. ‘Of course the one time they see a UFO, they use the worst camera imaginable.’
My B-Line photo used to be on Google images after being featured in an Easter newsletter from school that same year. I remember feeling lucky because it was in such poor resolution that even when people found it, it was blurred just enough to distort the details. Because the quality was so poor, it didn’t feel like the ‘whole’ thing, just a gesture of it, a copy of what it once was and so if it would be shared, every version of it would continue to deteriorate until it was unrecognisable from it’s origin. No longer on a B-Line but re-contextualised through a feature in the Easter Newsletter, it positions the photo as a ‘student who won 2nd place in Spoken English’, not as one of hundreds of school kids flashing their B-Line at the bus driver (if anybody actually used it as a bus discount I’ll never know).
As new developments in AI come to light, this contextualisation of images become more evident in the growing deepfake culture. Recently, I saw a video using a deepfake of Ice Spice from her Genius lyric video to explain a maths theory. Punk band, IDLES, did something similar, morphing Chris Martin in Coldplay’s music video for The Scientist to lip sync their newest song Grace. Artist Cecile Evans resurrects actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman into a digital avatar, reasserting him into her maximalist moving image piece Hyperlinks or it didn’t happen (2014). All of these claim the public idea of what someone can be, stripped from its original form and recast into something new; like copies of a sculpture or print sold at auction, does the ‘original’ have the most value? What is the ‘original’ version of a person? Is that the real one or are these questions just missing the point?
Faces are taken and strapped onto other contexts like masks to the point where this fear of being seen reveals itself more as a fear of being seen incorrectly, curating ourselves to fit an agenda. But how do we see ourselves correctly when we have so many perspectives and tools of seeing ourselves? Which is the real ‘correct’ one? Is the true self, the real us, seen through something as direct as a school photo or a deepfake version of ourselves in an exhibition? Stock photography or this kind of portrait photography feels unfrilled, direct and more than anything, honest; it feels as though it’s not lying to you because it doesn’t have much feeling involved. It’s used as a means of identifying something as though it’s already dead, with no life to live except the purpose it was given to represent data almost like an infographic; but why does something lacking in feeling seem more honest than something that does?
Photographic artist Richard Prince has faced controversy over the past decade for his collection of work, New Portraits. Using other people’s Instagram photos, Prince reasserts them as large prints exhibited initially in 2015 at Gagosian London, trying to ‘unemotionally’ and directly explore the idea that once an image is shared on Instagram, anyone has the rights to it. Whilst this context emphasises this wide surveillance and the ownership of how we view ourselves, it exploits people as a means of demonstrating exploitation, feeling primarily ironic. The examples of AI I’ve used feel vaguely harmless; of course there are extremely unethical examples e.g. deepfake porn but the examples I discussed still explore this ownership we have over ourselves within a mass-surveillance state without necessarily exploiting the individual they use. Ice Spice teaching maths is fun and accessible and something as visually nostalgic as Coldplay’s The Scientist has new life breathed into it.
But in Prince’s exploitation, his controversy causes a spectacle; with the backlash of those being shown in the work as examples of this surveillance as opposed to individuals, he has since faced lawsuits from musician Kim Gordon for her unconsenting inclusion in the work. The artist is then placed within the context, moving away from his intended meaning of an almost invisible omnipresence and instead placing him as the author of these images to be responsible for their distribution. It is an age-old argument in separating the art from the artist and so on and so forth; I’m not going to try and solve it today. But this entwining of the two feels prevalent within the figure of Andy Warhol. Known in part as the first celebrity artist, Warhol exists within the context of his work as a celebrity. With a background in advertising and the rise of capitalist culture at the time, he is a brand in himself, a ghost in his work. It is nearly impossible to separate the two.
His voice has more recently been recaptured through AI as part of Netflix’s series The Andy Warhol Diaries. The diaries could be fake, the stories told untrue but the use of his voice feels like the most real thing even though it’s the most artificial. It breathes new life into something passed and buried, contextualising Warhol away from his position as a celebrity artist into his other, almost ‘secret’ life as a lover.
I feel as though we’re made to view ourselves through being one thing with that one thing primarily centring around its contribution to market value; the Andy Warhol Diaries’ purpose feels as though it is intended to show another, almost ‘surprising’ part of the artist even though for him it might have been as equally large as his career. This is because more than anything it is easier to market something with a clear brand or aesthetic than something innately human which means to be something in flux with relationships, lives and interests that change, grow and decay. As a result, the production of a person as a performer is apparent now more than ever. We play roles as though we are in movies with videos that champion these paths as being the ‘main character’ only consolidating the exploitation of the individual as something for production and market value, disguised as a ‘true’ insight into an individual person’s ‘purpose’ or ‘path’ when there is no such thing. It is trying to offer concrete certainty, to freeze something within a frame, when change is inevitable and constant and trying to capture this within the nets of consumerism is nearly impossible.
This feels particularly apparent in the recent ‘glow up’ of Mark Zuckerberg; the re-contextualising of celebrities now is just marketing to sell a product of a person in order to sell the product that person sells. His PR team have ‘upgraded’ his image, giving him a chain, curlier more laid back hair and recent articles of him fighting in MMA and owning a farm in Hawaii to give him a new gravitas. It makes you think of him as more popular; as opposed to the photos of his dump truck riding waves with thick layers of suncream lathered on him, he still surfs just with a more surfy look. His face has been taken from it’s other form as a robotic nerd and reconstructed as an athletic American man who now owns a farm and apocalyptic bunker too. A true American idol, mythologised and rebuilt time and time again.
Physical changes of appearance show ourselves in an alternative light, they make us feel differently about ourselves or reveal parts of ourselves we left hidden. I had my photo taken ‘professionally’ a few years ago at college; the photographer, coincidentally, said the same thing to me as I was told in year 7. ‘Give us a grin, a smile showing your teeth’. I reluctantly did and was struck again with the same dislike as I was the first time this kind of photo was taken, only this time my hair wasn’t straightened, my skin was paler and a piece of chicken hung in my tooth at the front. Is this truly how others see me?
Candid photography, often romanticised, in its idea of the in-between makes people feel as though that is their ‘true’ self, moving away from the layers of posing in studio photography to reveal a person captured unabashed and unposed. Why isn’t performance considered the true and real self too? When the world rides off a person presenting as one thing, do fractures of the real self come through in different roles?
Oscar Wilde once said:
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”
I hate the cliche of it but it’s only a cliche because it’s become relatable for so many people. Whilst this quote has been taken to reveal the ways fictional stories unearth something hidden about someone, how we identify ourselves depends on the context. It depends on the vehicle in which we are identifying ourselves; there are so many different modes to view ourselves now that we are fractured across all of them without the autonomy to show this fractured self. We look to characters online, in films, TV shows as a means of navigating this, placing ourselves in the pursuit of these characters’ qualities in order to view ourselves in the idolised way we view them. We have to show ourselves as one thing in order to gain some sort of professional value from it, to market ourselves more easily, not as something in flux and changing like humans have always been.
I think the reason why I don’t like my photo taken a lot usually is because I’m bored of seeing myself; I see myself everyday, thinking about how I’m viewed by others and in turn how I view myself. Sadie took a photo of me for a project she did a couple of years ago; I was playing the part of the Jester, a character typically used for mass entertainment. But when I look at it now, even without all that context, it feels so unfamiliar to how I view myself that I feel it is closer to the truth of who I am or who I feel I am than my sterile B-Line photo; even though I’m cast in a fictional narrative surrounding a circus set with the smell of hay circling our flat for two weeks, it still ‘feels’ real.
I was hoping for a neater end to this piece, something more definitive, concrete and conclusive; a fear in my nervous system operated on, taken out and put in a glass jar to point and look at. But no matter how I try and write it, it never ends up like that because it isn’t something that can be so easily separated from my body. I would have to live in a completely alternative reality where mass surveillance didn’t exist, where the developing technologies didn’t exacerbate this and where grind culture didn’t feed off of this.
I’ll never be seen the same way as I did in my B-Line photo nor in the photo of me below. After writing this I realise I’ll never have my mouth the way I want it, never have my smile the way the photographer likes it; I always hate having teeth but I feel lucky to have them. I’ve always found them vaguely annoying, distracting and something to worry or criticise about; even when I was younger, I would wait until an adult tooth had grown behind the baby one before I would have no choice but to take it out. Change, like the pain of taking a baby tooth out, is something I try to avoid but is usually met with a reward if I do go through with it. A coin under the pillow, my teeth keep changing and have been taken out by myself, by dentists, cast in braces, retainers, brushed and tampered with. I think I was scared of my teeth changing because I was scared of losing them or turning out ugly or people rejecting me if they saw them.
I’m scared of my teeth because, like a lot of things in a body, they change whether I want them to or not; I have some control over it but rather than admit the control I do have on them, I choose to reject and hide them from view because any authority who’s seen them (e.g. dentist) has said they’re not good enough. I am a person who cares less about their appearance as a means of seeming unbothered about being seen when really I am extremely bothered about the way I’m seen.
Perhaps the photographers who took my B-Line or college photo were trying to communicate something cosmic that would unravel itself over a decade, urging me that my teeth or any part of me shouldn’t be hidden, left to rot in the dark. Or maybe I’m just making up some grand meaning from an authority because I have no trust in how I view myself, that I must view myself through how others see me because my view is inherently ‘false’. Why is it that people feel as though I’m hiding something when I don’t show my teeth? Because maybe I am.
I had a website blocker installed on my laptop when I was younger called K9 Web Protection Service. Despite the friendliness of it’s blonde Labrador logo it’s methods only revealed this image as it’s disguise; I understand the need for parents to add blockers on their kids’ iPads or laptops because the internet is so vast you never know what you might come across. On Facebook when I was 13 I saw a man beheaded with a chainsaw, appearing on my feed alongside friends’ selfies on Photo Booth in 3D glasses and YTO rating posts. I initially thought that it wasn’t real because it was filmed with such a bad camera, shared so widely and so accessible on Facebook that there was no way it could be real; I watched every second of it, thinking it was the result of a very talented VFX team working on a film and it’s from that memory I can understand the need for website blockers.
But any time I would go on a website K9 deemed ‘wrong’ which could be anything as PC as a Newsround article (BBC news for kids) for example, it would bark repeatedly, freezing on that page until one of my parents came through and turned it off. Without even going on anything vaguely explicit, it would deem my actions ‘wrong’, barking at me. An invisible eye watching and monitoring me, it took the ‘truths’ of what is right and wrong and placed them in its own paws, leaving me and the page I’d opened frozen in a single frame. Did it finally capture me in this ‘whole’ true light as I sit there confused as to what I did ‘wrong’, ashamed and guilty over something else’s ‘right’ and ‘true’ judgment? Just like the photographer taking my B-Line photo, I had no decision over which was the right or wrong version of me.
And so there is still something there hiding. Even when people ask me to show my teeth, I’m worried they won’t like what they find. And so I grin, with a crocodile smile and a jester’s hat, trying to listen to what I think is right and wrong, true and false but this dog keeps barking over the top.
How do you tame a dog with a crocodile smile?