'Photos of myself make me shudder in horror. Do pictures reflect reality?'

Read my latest Ask Ugly column.

The next installment of Ask Ugly, my monthly beauty advice column for the Guardian, is here!

Hello Ugly,

Photos of myself make me shudder in horror. I focus on my eyes (small and pouchy) my skin (pasty) and my chin (large and spotty). Very Henry VIII! These are all ongoing insecurities, but day-to-day, I am content with how I look. Occasionally, I even feel pretty. So it’s hard not to be convinced, when I see a photograph of myself, that I am under a horrible illusion of being happily average-looking and am actually pretty hideous. This is made even worse when I see a photo as being terribly unflattering and others say it’s nice! I am aware this is quite superficial, but it makes me really upset. Which is the truth here? Because surely an average-looking person would not have every photo looking so awful it actually hurts.

– Photo Finished

Illustration: Lola Beltran/The Guardian

My mother is gorgeous. Stunning, even. She was Homecoming Queen in high school and has the smile of a true crime cliché (that is to say, it lights up a room). Blonde, razor-cut bangs frame her big, brown eyes – rimmed in her signature liquid liner, always – which literally twinkle when she laughs.

There is no photographic evidence of this.

I cannot make sense of it, but something happens to this dear, beautiful woman whenever a camera comes near. Her face contorts at the click of a shutter. A combination of the following features appears in every picture she’s ever taken: Squeezed-shut lids. Crossed eye. Eyebrow askance. Elvis lip. Cowlick. I sometimes insist a particular picture isn’t as bad as she thinks; I’m lying. Her driver’s license photo? Horrendous. Her Facebook profile picture? A close-up of the family dog.

I take comfort in this whenever I come across a less-than-flattering image of myself. Photos do not reflect reality, I think. Just look at all the terrible pictures of Mom!

Maybe you can take comfort in this too, Photo Finished. (She knows I’m sharing this, by the way.) But I also hope you (and I!) can examine why my mom’s example might ease our minds – and why we panic over “bad” pictures anyway.

In the roughly 200 years since the invention of the camera, photography has become a key way people in modern societies look at the world, and therefore verify its (and our own) existence. “The look of the world continually proposes and confirms our relation to [its] thereness, which nourishes our sense of being,” explains art critic John Berger in Understanding A Photograph.

Pictures assume more than a metaphysical importance in modern life; they also take on a cerebral importance. “What served in the place of the photograph, before the camera’s invention?” Berger asks. “Memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection.”

Considering photography’s function as a spiritual symbol and second brain, I wouldn’t say obsessing over pictures of yourself is superficial. It’s almost inevitable. More so when you account for this technology’s effect on beauty standards.

The prevalence of the camera has resulted in a “tremendous promotion of the value of appearances”, Susan Sontag writes in her 1977 essay collection On Photography. The more beautiful the appearance, the more valuable it is, and the more moral it’s presumed. In fact, promoting beauty and morality is baked into the premise of photography: when inventor Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841, he called it the calotype – kalos being the Greek word for both beautiful and noble.

As picture-taking has changed our relationship to being and memory, beauty and morality, it’s also changed our bodies.

The cameras of the 1920s were low-definition, making subjects appear super-smooth and unblemished. Public perception of celebrity-level beauty changed, and skin-smoothing cosmetics surged in popularity. In the 1980s, digital airbrushing became standard practice in women’s magazines, and cosmetic enhancements to emulate the effect of airbrushing followed. (Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Foundation is still a best-seller.)

People came to prefer the representation to the real – which is probably why an “unflattering” representation bothers you, despite your general satisfaction with the real.

This impulse has only gotten stronger since selfies took over social media. Consider “Instagram Face”, a now-ubiquitous blend of facial features inspired by photo-editing tools like filters, Facetune and Photoshop: ageless skin, full lips, high cheekbones, small nose, wide eyes.

Grafting these online effects onto an actual face demands significant cosmetic investment: makeup and skincare (there are real products called Skin Filter Serum, Augmented Skin Face Cream and Software Update Retinol), injectables (neuromodulators, fillers) and surgeries (nose jobs, facelifts). Since the emergence of Instagram Face in 2019, the plastic surgery sector has grown about 10%, and the number of injectable procedures performed in the United States and Canada has increased by 70%. Aesthetic doctors report that patients will bring in their own “beauty filtered photos” as references “for the plastic surgeon to imitate”.

These violent processes – scalpels, syringes, smashed bones, scraped cartilage – nod to what Sontag called the “predatory” nature of pictures. They’re often endured in the name of authenticity.

As more functions of modern life move to the virtual realm, people say they feel “most like themselves” online, behind the mask of an avatar. This follows naturally from our magical thinking about photography. Throughout history, many cultures believed a person’s picture was a manifestation of their spirit, and fragments of that belief remain today. “For example, in our reluctance to tear up or throw away the photograph of a loved one, especially of someone dead or far away,” Sontag says. The current equivalent? Our reluctance to leave our filtered faces in our phones.

And so, I understand why you’re struggling to identify which version of you – the flesh or the photo – is the true you.

The rest of my answer includes:

• what makes unedited photographs a less-than ideal means for “conveying truth”, too

• how digital screens further separate pictures from reality (the science of IRL vision vs. URL vision is truly fascinating)

• how attachment to the illusions of image-making hurts us, physically and psychologically

• why this questioner is actually in a fantastic place (they may not be content in the image world, but they’re content in the physical world – the multi-dimensional world of time and space and life, of feelings and connection and beauty beyond screens!)

• how to work through negative thoughts re: a “bad” picture

• and more!

Click through to the Guardian to read the whole thing (and if you decide to share it with friends or on social media or whatever, please share it via the Guardian link).

P.S. Here’s a tidbit that didn’t make the final edit:

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never seem themselves,” Sontag says. (I’m sure this is part of the questioner’s dilemma, too. It’s unsettling to think other people have knowledge of you that you don’t have of yourself.) “It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” She believes the camera is “a sublimation of the gun” (consider the language of its use: loading film, aiming the lens, shooting) and the photograph “a sublimated murder.”

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