2/14/2016

Who's Who? The Changing Nature and Uses of Portraits - The New York Times

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WhosWho?The
ChangingNature
andUsesofPortraits
Nov. 16, 2015
If having ones portrait taken in the mid-19th century was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
today we picture ourselves easily and often.
On any given day, it is estimated that more than a million selfies are taken, underscoring
how both portraiture and self-portraiture, democratized by the spread of camera phones,
have become parallel and long-term processes. Consumer-friendly apps like Snapseed
enable us to engineer and then test-drive the public selves we present to the world. People
fuss over Facebook profile pictures, tweaking them to express solidarity or outrage, while
parents are offered the chance to have their childs school picture professionally retouched.
Transgender women in West Virginia demanded and won the right to have their
drivers license show them with the hairstyle and clothing they wear every day.
Increasingly, we define ourselves by who we show ourselves to be.
Yet while our fascination with portraiture is neurologically wired and culturally ingrained,
what is striking is the growing sense of uneasiness springing up around portraiture as
imaging technology becomes more sophisticated and its use covert.
Making or allowing a portrait to be made may seem to be a more lighthearted activity than it
was in the past, even though were aware of how images can lead unexpected afterlives. But
it is the photographs that are made of us and used without our knowledge or consent that
make us the most anxious as facial-recognition software becomes more precise and widely
employed.
Historically, photographic portraiture and insecurity went hand in hand. The less we faced

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2/14/2016

Who's Who? The Changing Nature and Uses of Portraits - The New York Times

the cameras lens, the more we wondered how we might appear to ourselves and others.
Even though the selfie phenomenon and ease of uploading personal pictures has led to a
certain bravado, the spread of surveillance cameras is a reminder that some of our lingering
anxieties around photography are not misplaced.
The scrutiny and data-mining of faces has become a really big deal, as Alvaro Bedoya,
executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University, said
recently. Facial recognition lets people you never met and never heard of identify you from
far away without your knowledge or permission.
The issue raises a big point: Who has the right to collect, assess and make use of the
biometrics of your face the measurements that detail the distances between your eyes,
nose, mouth and the edges of your jaw?
Your biometrics are regularly collected by security and law enforcement agencies, retail
establishments and social media outlets when you post images online, shop in stores, travel
and walk on the street. For now, no federal laws or state laws (outside of Illinois and Texas)
control the practice.
As a result, being anonymous in public might be a thing of the past, as Ben Sobel, another
expert at the Center on Privacy and Technology, has written. Photographic portraits we are
complicit with are images that allow us to explore, revel in and assert ourselves. Images
made when we are unaware and not in control of them are, the more you know and think
about them, destabilizing.
The face-tagging employed by Facebook that seems like fun to some is creepy to others. And
for good reason: Software similar to that used overseas to track terrorists has been used
domestically to scan outdoor concerts and public events and, in some cities, to run identity
checks of drivers pulled over for minor traffic infractions.
In meetings hosted by a division of the Commerce Department this year, consumer, civil
liberty and privacy advocacy groups repeatedly found themselves at odds with trade
associations representing facial recognition developers, vendors and stakeholders. Until
guidelines are agreed upon, as we are seen and pictured, we will be watched. With an
estimated 1.8 billion images shared online daily, and as closed-circuit television cameras
capture our every move in towns and cities around the world, one cannot help but wonder
who sees and scans portraits and to what end.
We had faces, the character Norma Desmond, a wild-eyed, aging movie star, exclaimed
about her visage and the past in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. As image-reading and
data-extraction technology advance and as portraiture becomes ever more contested

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