BY RORY SYKES

In print | Published October 25, 2007

My past few weeks have included a visit by a close friend leaving the country indefinitely, a vomit-inducing migraine, studying for the soul-crushing onslaught of midterms, countless hours of work in Philadelphia for upcoming puppet parades and an attempt to come to terms with the monstrosity that is the new Student Events Calendar as I strategize advertising for November’s Class Awareness Month. I know, poor me.

Amidst this mess, I’ve lacked the opportunity to indulge in a Friday night spent eyeing the multiple types of finery on display and constructing strangers’ back-stories at the Philly Museum of Art. Under these circumstances, I hope you won’t mind a temporary topic substitution as I instead discuss a distinctly more lowbrow forum for visual culture: namely, the Facebook photo album. Is talking about Facebook photo albums passé? Given that I’ve done so in two separate Swarthmore classes and that I’ve read two national newspaper articles within the past couple of weeks about Facebook more generally, it seems the answer is “yes.”

But as a senior, I’ve felt the allure of documenting my existence (by which I mean to say, the ABSURD AMOUNTS OF FUN MY VERY COOL FRIENDS AND I ARE HAVING) more strongly than ever (if simultaneously more distasteful for its greater sense of desperation), so hey — count me among the out-of-touch commentators on “youth culture” and “revolutionary virtual networking sites” and be done with it.

I’ve always had difficulty understanding the impulse to break up the flow of a bangin’ Paces party by whipping out one’s camera and grabbing the closest sweaty bodies and demanding posed exuberance. Where are the cameras being kept during the act of the grind, the alleged pretense of entering the drunken Saturday night fray? To what extent do the people who habitually take dance party pictures actually participate in what will become the framing device for their latest Facebook photo album – that is, the party itself?

I ask these questions (and more, oh so many more) because it seems to me that these photo albums are intended to create seamless narratives of youthful debauchery, reveling in the depictions of our bodies (both physical and social) at their peak. And yet, in order to create such coherent proofs — capsules of experiences — one has to engage in a notable degree of disruption during the act of partying itself, the supposed purpose of which is having fun as opposed to documenting fun.

Beyond the physical disruption for the photograph’s subjects that results from engaging in the mechanical process of using the camera, there’s also the visual disruption for the others at the party as flash after flash goes off, recreating in micro the frenzied capturing of celebrity images. This conceptual tension between the disruptive act of documenting for the album, and the album’s intentional denial of such disruptions in order to promote a glossy-finished product of manufactured awesomeness leaves me marveling at the actual work involved in constructing one’s identity through Facebook.

To expand outwards, it is the multiplicity of frames devoted to Britney exiting a store — recalling Muybridge’s motion studies of the past - that contributes to a performance where a value is placed on even the slightest change, the slightest alteration in appearance or configuration, where there is an endless attempt to get at the truth of one’s self, or one’s self-image. In the Facebook photo album context, there are the endless pre-party photos of dressing up, drinking, slightly varying the tilt of one’s chin to optimize one’s photogenic potential, only to be followed by picture after picture of the same group of people in a rotation of similar activities, but placed at the actual party with the addition of paparazzi-style camera flash lighting, winding down with the last few photos that contain captions alluding to the substance or exhaustion-induced loss of both memory and physical ability to take photos that inevitably signals the end to a successful night.

Photography as a medium developed from an original function of documentation and categorization stemming from the belief in its truth value. What was captured on film was understood to be a literal index of reality. Many of the earliest photographs were of utterly mundane subject matter — fossils, for instance — and were intended as scientific records. Similarly, the party pictures of today are notable for their repetitive nature (think of the countless images of keg stands, of red cups proudly held aloft, of grinning flushed faces, of impossibly dangling cigarettes, of cheeky middle fingers). From where does the impulse stem to return to this original function of capturing a thing (in this case, a party) in such tedious detail? Is a Paces party really that important to document so carefully, so regularly? Can we now imagine Paces, or construct memories of its parties without its excessive imaging that is placed in so public a forum as Facebook? The cynic in me says no. And that same cynic will probably be bringing a camera to the next round of Swat-style dance parties. After all, I’ve gotta capture my senior year in all its glorious detail, right?

Rory is a senior. You can reach her at rsykes1@swarthmore.edu.

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