The Second Gaze: How the Panopticon Permutes Photographic Practices and Promotes Private Personae

Currently we are in a golden age of photography-- we consume and create more photos each year than in the first century of photography.  It has quite literally never in history been easier to use our individual, personal gaze and make photographic images and to share them with people around the globe-- forever visible.  We are adapted to be aware of a Second Gaze, that of the judging public at large, which by the nature of the current internet is not bound by proximity of space or time. I suspect this has changed the nature of how we create and think about personal photography, how we see ourselves, and encourages us to find privacy by masking our true selves. 

In the past, with the exception of commercial and journalistic photographers, very few people could share their work with more than a handful of friends and family.  We could safely assume that no one outside our personal sphere would ever see the artwork we create, and that we would never be punished for it. For some people, this private photography offered tremendous freedom: Vivian Maier had her private voice, and untold numbers of other people were able to explore and play with their own identity in a safe space without fear of being ostracized (or worse):  https://time.com/3393976/casa-susanna-photographs-from-a-1950s-transvestite-hideaway/

Now, photographs are generally taken with the expectation of being shared publicly.  Its practically a tautology that we take photographs to show to other people. Modern digital cameras have wi-fi built in so that you can instantly transfer photographs to your phone and in turn to social media.  Out to the world. A world with people, looking at your work, and back towards you. Approving. Judging.

Recently I have been thinking about how in the last several years, the primary way people view and interact with my work is through social media, specifically Instagram.  Even when doing photo sessions that involve nudity and thus won’t be fit for sharing on social media, I often take “Instagram friendly” extra shots during sessions so that the people I work with can have at least a few photos that can be shared publicly and won’t have to be censored.  It’s that last part that got me… working around censorship. But not really going around censorship, it’s dealing with it. Going through with it. Avoiding it but embracing it. Self-Censoring to avoid being censored. Judging myself preemptively to avoid being judged.

Censorship is a real issue on social media platforms.  Not just flagging a nipple for deletion, but also banning, and what I call soft-censorship.  A few people I know, one a famous rope artist in Japan and the other a woman who models for fun, no longer appear in searches, even when I type out their full username.  I can look them up only in the list of posts I have favorited, and while occasionally I see them in my news feed, they are basically cut off from new audiences. Even if someone wants to find them, and already knows who they are, their profiles are kept from view.  A soft yet draconian approach to managing the art/porn divide.  

Instagram does this because it must.  Allowing nudity on the platform would require it to be marked 18+ in the app store, and close it off from that most precious of advertising demographics: young teenagers.  Tumblr had a problem with pornography on their site, and the new owners decided to use an AI to automatically flag and delete all photographic depictions of human nudity. As you can imagine, it didn’t work very well.  In addition to flagging innocent photographs of ice cream cones, it also decimated the community of photographers whose work involves nudity or sensuality. There’s no room for nuance in algorithms, and the late Ren Hang’s work was mostly wiped out.  The platform has been mostly wiped out, and when I return occasionally, practically none of the people I followed have posted. I don’t know whether they moved elsewhere or stopped sharing online entirely.

(A note: In my case, as well as the ones above, we are for the most part heteronormative people featuring conventionally attractive subjects in our work.  Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Disabled, and other minority groups face much greater reproach from the ‘community.’ I can’t elaborate much more because I don’t have as much knowledge of the issues that they face, but I urge you to look out and find voices to hear their takes first-hand.)

I wonder, do people change change what they shoot when they know that people will be looking?  It's hard to tell how much of an effect there is, because frankly everyone has had one or two decades of being trained by this system.  Everyone I know and their mom have been on Facebook at some point, encouraged to share their life highlights and homemade dinners. I think by this point, everyone is familiar with the performative aspect of social media.

What about when we aren’t trying to share ourselves though?  Personally, I feel strange making work just for myself. My series with M is one example, though eventually I followed my friends’ suggestions and shared it publicly.  Shooting that series with her gave me a giddy high, a feeling of doing something practically forbidden, in secrecy and safety. The idea of releasing it into the world however, felt like a cataclysm.  I was afraid that I would be cast out for sharing something so intimate. I wasn’t sure if I should try to hide my work from my boss at work, but when she did eventually see it, she loved it. All that fear, why?  For What?

There are no rules in photography, naturally.  Nobody is holding a gun to my head and telling me what and what not to shoot.  I’m not in a dictatorship where I’ll be imprisoned for taking photographs of friends and lovers.  The fears I’m dealing with probably have at least as much to do with my Catholic upbringing as with being addicted to social media.  Much of my youth in Catholic school was spent learning about Adam & Eve, the guilt of Original Sin, and how sensuality was an incentive for making children, period.  No wonder my first love in high school was such a thrill. Not going to lie, at the time I was still pretty religious. After all, my entire life certain tenets of religion had been drilled into me: 

To paraphrase George Carlin, an Omnipresent, Omniscient, Panoptic God is watching, judging you, for your entire life, and if you ever break one of His rules, you’ll be cast out to hell forever.  But He loves you!

But that was then.  Now, there’s less divine judgement to worry about.  We get on with our days, have our romances, and we upload our lives on social media platforms, where they can be seen by anyone, anywhere, any time… and if someone reports you for being against ‘community standards’ because there’s a female nipple or a male penis, you’ll be banned.  But you get Likes!

But what about other kinds of judgement?  School children are bullied if they can’t keep up with social media etiquette-- if you aren’t following and liking all your friends’ posts, are you really friends?  Models and Actors I know have lost out on jobs to others because they had larger online followings. Even on a smaller scale, I’ve also learned how to better pose myself in group photos-- stretch your neck an inch or two towards the camera, with your chin up a bit in order to accentuate your neck and jawline, making you look slimmer, and do a slight squint so that your eyes don’t look like a Muppet.  I do this because I know that I’ll appear in other people’s posts, and Facebook’s algorithm will identify and tag me in their photographs… so even if it’s not my photo, I should probably try to look good. I’m also more acutely aware of my weight in photos, especially if I’ve been eating too much recently. I wonder how much of this is me accurately anticipating what other people will see in photos, or paranoid imaginings what other people will see?

How many other people are shaped by how they imagine they will be perceived by others?  How are you?

What strikes me as the most unusual part of all this, is how set in stone it feels.  It has been more or less like this since Facebook opened up its privacy and allowed in users who were not college students in 2006.  I think that was the point when Real Life and Online Life really began to merge. Before that, it seemed that one’s online life could be completely separate from their real world life.  Aside from Myspace profiles, almost no one needed to use their real names if they didn’t want to, and digital cameras weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. Social media networks also came and went, leaving no trace.  I had one or more accounts on Livejournal, Xanga, AIM, Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Zone, Bolt, and a few more that I can’t remember, or choose to forget. Each one of these has faded into obscurity, like an embarrassing high school yearbook photo, safely forgotten on some shelf. 

But now, it has been over 15 years of Facebook, and Facebook will be more than happy to remind you of that old yearbook photo, and share it with everyone who cares to look.  The irony is that your digital life is now more carefully stored and more easily accessed than real memories, making it more real and lasting than ‘reality’ is. Furthermore, years of Facebook privacy scandals have taught people to assume that nothing will stay private as long as there’s a buck to be made.  One of my friends recently discovered that an embarrassing post you put online ten years ago, back when only your friends in your college freshman dorm could see it, can in fact resurface. It had a joke in poor taste, and he suddenly found himself locked out of his account for a month. As far as I know he hasn’t harmed anyone, and he’s certainly grown as a person by leaps and bounds since he was 19… haven’t you?

How does human society change when people may face retribution for private remarks made in the distant past?  

Of course, you can mitigate some of the problems of dealing with a timeless panopticon by making a secondary, private account, sometimes known as a Finsta (from ‘Fake Insta’).  I know a handful of people who maintain one social media profile which is public, designed to be found by relatives, employers, coworkers, or students. It is bland and rarely updated, for your potential employer to look up and then be satisfied that you’re not some deviant who goes to parties.  Then they also keep a private profile where they only add the closest of friends and most distant of strangers. Here they can post whatever they like, be it ranting complaints about their industry or nude self portraits taken in their home’s morning sunlight. If a coworker happens upon it, they may find themselves in a position of having to defend themselves for having a life outside of a day-job, or quickly delete it entirely and make a new one for a fresh start.

While some may find this strange, I think it’s good to have some freedom, some outlet where you don’t need to follow all the rules and expectations of society.  During my formative years as a teen and as an artist, I certainly appreciated having the space to explore without judgement, without having to consider the second gaze of others watching over my shoulder.  I’ve been able to take objectively bad photos for years and years before I started to improve. I got to have bad opinions, and grow out of them as I learned and became a better person. As the internet becomes more and more centralized, controlled by a tight monopoly of interwoven tech giants that make sure everything is visible and nothing is ever forgotten, I am afraid that younger people and artists won’t be able to have that kind of freedom to have their mistakes be forgotten.  

John Wooden once said the true test of one’s character is who they are when no one is watching.  With so much of online culture centered around being watched, all the time, maybe we should remember to carve out time and spaces where we can exist without being watched, or at least control who we let into our worlds, and for how long the view lasts.  For me, that means doing some photography with the intent of not sharing, and being playful with it. You might see a future blog post with those, but then again...  

Maybe I’ll keep those to myself.

Thanks for reading, and for being part of the panopticon.  As fearsome as it is to be seen, I’m glad that you have shared your attention.  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, especially if you think I’ve missed anything.