Underwear As Outerwear: Baring Our Souls Through Digital Visuals Is Now A Habit

Soul-bearing shouts out loud in 2018 and is part of public discussion. As #MeToo has been leading the trend for opening up about what was formally only hinted at, talking about the weather feels passé and we crave “the real”. We blog and vlog and rant and post about divorce, death, infertility, dreams, loans, unfriending on Facebook, desire and disappointment. Marriott International hotels are introducing glass shower doors letting guests write and share sentences, doodles or equations that come to them, in the condensation, which are then recorded and emailed to them. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we edit our photos and select images and GIFs to express something about ourselves that is more than superficial. The collective passion for mental wellbeing and the underlying interest in our inner selves that is linked to it, are now finding expression in artistic endeavor. This is made visible as more people feel emboldened to speak about themselves through digital photo editing tools reaching them via apps on the mobile devices that are with them, always and everywhere.

Double exposure as confession

Double exposure is a popular photographic technique that deliberately plays with our perception, combining two different images into a single image. A redhead’s curls extend into the branches of a tree or a cityscape, a ski slope blends into a bed sheet draped over a mountain or piano keys melt into a zebra’s stripes. It has been powerfully showcased with strong surrealist elements by photographers like Thomas Barbèy, Jerry Uelsmann, Tommy Oshima, Erik Johansson and millions of ‘ordinary’ people who are experimenting with artistic photo editing.

This technique has roots in traditional film-based photography and is often used to add people and objects to a scene that weren’t originally there and create nostalgic, peaceful or unsettling feelings in the viewer. Digital photography enables images to be superimposed over each other using a desktop program like Adobe Photoshop or a photo editing smartphone app such as Enlight Photofox. By altering the opacity of the image and overlaying one image over another, they’re blended together to create an artistic effect that conveys an often-complex feeling. Look again and your sun hat is made up of beating, visceral hearts.

Visuals getting better at emotional intelligence

The use of elements like emojis has blossomed as people beyond Japan, where these “picture characters” originated, have warmed to the visual codes of digital life, even if some meanings get lost in translation. The time famine inherent in our on-the-go lifestyles makes the emotional shorthand of emojis so appealing and therefore so ubiquitous. “emoji translator” is now a job title. For World Emoji Day in summer 2017, Facebook revealed 60 million emojis are sent on their site daily — five billion on Messenger. “In text messages, it’s often hard to read someone else’s feelings…emojis allow us to express feelings in writing” says Marius Spix, a German software developer who has proposed new emojis to Unicode, a non-profit that sets standards on new symbolic facial expressions, figures and objects.

Emojis, now more diverse, are adapting to tell our authentic life stories. HighSpeedInternet.com surveyed people in nine English-speaking countries in late 2017 about their emoji usage. While the ‘traditional’ smiley is the firm favorite, it’s significant that the laugh-crying emoji is runner up in four countries. In mid-2017, Plan International, a development non-profit, ran a competition to design emojis conveying menstruation to make talking about this topic easier through a route people feel comfortable with.

Emotions are complicated. Introji are emojis designed for more complex emotional states. Acknowledging that exaggerated cartoon antics may not express a fuller emotional range, particularly inner states of mind or ‘alone activities’, Californian designer, Rebecca Lynch, offers an app with more nuanced emojis. These include feeling alone in a group and recharging our batteries. For 2018, Spix has proposed a puzzle piece simultaneously standing for unity (part of a whole) and for something tricky.

The GIF, a miniature video clip, just long enough to convey a single emotional gesture such as anger or excitement, and simple enough to cross cultures, is moving towards the frontline of online expression. Popular GIFs like “Crying [Michael] Jordan” or “Blinking White Guy” are shared by millions.

Photographic images themselves can also be sharpened, softened, blurred and animated through editing. Mirror images can be created and images horizontally or vertically flipped to place the sky beneath the waves, for instance, or squeeze the horizon nearer the earth for a sense of claustrophobia.

Acclaimed photographer and conceptual artist, Cindy Sherman, has manipulated images of her own face using portrait editing apps such as Facetune 2, Perfect365 and YouCam Makeup. She digitally distorts and duplicates her eyes and other facial features until they near the edge of recognition to express her horror of routine and to critique how culture shapes appearances. A cinemagraph is a ‘living photo’ — a still image with just one moving element such as the hem of a dress, or rippling waves — which can tell a story poignantly by forcing the viewer to focus on one jarring moving element.

The ‘Selfie Epidemic’

Whether or not you suffer from “Selfitis” the obsessive ‘malady’ originally appearing in a spoof article that has now been made official by an academic study in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, these edited smartphone self-portraits reveal more than just scantily-clad pouty people. Selfie-snapping goes beyond the taking of a photo. It can include the built-in editing of color and contrast, the altering of backgrounds and the addition of other dramatic tweaks before uploading and sharing.

Selfies and the activity around them project loud signals about individuality and narcissism and an often-desperate desire to fit in. How much can a selfie tell us about the person who took it? Beyond more shallow information such as what we had for lunch, or just the joy of a joke among friends, selfies share more about our inner worlds than people posting them on social media may realize. Things like which of our body parts we’re most confident about, how messy our rooms are, or even TMI (too much information) such as if we’re wearing underwear or not, speak louder than words.

Daphne Kasriel-Alexander