Images of bodies impact young people, especially young girls and women. The normative implications of those images—what a body ought to look like and what a body ought not to look like—affect their self-esteem. A 2021 exposé of internal research conducted by Facebook (now Meta) on its photo-sharing app Instagram revealed the company itself tracked what most of us knew intuitively or anecdotally already: the platform exacerbates the mental distress of millions of its young users because of the way it presents users’ bodies and lifestyles. Researchers at Instagram found the app “makes body image worse for one in three teenage girls” and that young people across all demographics “blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression” because “social comparison is worse on Instagram.”
Why is social comparison “worse” on Instagram or, one imagines, photo-sharing apps in general? The problem with platforms like Instagram is broadly understood to be the ease with which photos are manipulated, projecting highly curated images that fail to reflect reality. Hence, young people are purportedly duped into comparing themselves to an impossible ideal. In a 2021 article for CNN entitled “Instagram’s Grim Appeal as a Silent Self-Esteem Breaker,” psychologist Dr. John Duffy notes he’s worked with “countless girls” who, driven by fear of ridicule or embarrassment, significantly alter images of themselves to post on social media. Duffy recounts watching one of his young clients undergo the lengthy process of posting an image of herself on Instagram: “It takes that long for her to alter and filter a photo of herself enough to feel comfortable posting it on Instagram. She demonstrated the process once in my office, admitting that she knew it looked nothing like her. But the ‘likes’ poured in so quickly, such that she knew she would be doing it again the next day. She called it a ‘self-esteem addiction’.”
Duffy’s account shows that his client is well-aware Instagram is awash in dissimulation. Editing and augmenting her own image, she’s ostensibly clear-eyed about the nature of the platform and knows the images it features are a poor metric for legitimate or meaningful comparison between actual bodies or lifestyles. So, teenagers—indeed let’s be honest, all social media users—are trading in images that we know aren’t precise representations. But it isn’t clear that the problems would be solved if the images themselves were more authentic.
In an apparent backlash to the inauthenticity cultivated by platforms like Instagram, Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau founded the app BeReal in 2020 to counter the “overproduced and hypermanicured world of social media.” BeReal asks users to post “unvarnished glimpses of their everyday lives during a constantly changing 2-minute window each day.” As of February 2023, just over 10 million users accessed the app, most from the US, UK, and Germany (this represents no more than a small dent in Instagram’s 300 million users worldwide). I was first made aware of BeReal this past semester when a student jumped up during the break in one of my classes: the app had notified them it was time to submit a photo to be shared amongst their followers. If they didn’t submit a candid photo on time, they would be punished by the platform, blocked from seeing their follower’s feeds. This student handed me their phone, pleading with urgency that a picture be taken. The student and two friends quickly assumed a “carefree group pose”: two standing casually in the back, while the third lunged in front, resting right forearm on right thigh and throwing a peace sign with their left hand. After calls to hurry up, and some guidance from still more students about what to press where, I snapped the photo in time to satisfy the app. What I didn’t realize—until after the photo was taken—was that the post would include an image of me as well; photos for BeReal are taken simultaneously from a phone’s front-facing and back-facing cameras.
The on-demand self-surveillance practice of BeReal rumbles with disquieting echoes from Michel Foucault’s theorization of the surveilled, docile body in Discipline and Punish almost too perfectly. How BeReal is intended to resolve the so-called problem of inauthenticity on the internet and how complying with the app’s surveillance regimen is the putative answer to this putative problem remains unclear. Remarkably, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a public narrative of this nature play out. That is, this isn’t the first time in modern Western history a society has embraced one form of mass media as more virtuous in its representational form than another. Moreover, this also isn’t the first time images of young, feminized bodies have been the flashpoint for this conflict about medium and truth.
In 1920s Germany, Siegfried Kracauer, a journalist and cultural critic who orbited the Frankfurt School, wrote about the cancellation of German Expressionism in favor of the New Objectivity movement. As opposed to the abstract, Romantic aesthetic of Expressionist painting, New Objectivity purported to offer an unsentimental, naturalistic portrait of its subjects. Kracauer was less concerned with New Objectivity as a fine arts movement, however, than he was with the way it reorganized cultural aesthetics on a mass level. In other words, it was the “trickle down effect” of New Objectivity with which Kracauer was concerned. Working at the newspaper the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer became critical of reportage: a style of reporting that, in his view, mirrored the aesthetic values of New Objectivity portraiture. In reportage, Kracauer saw a kind of writing that functioned as “the self-declaration of concrete existence” by purporting to “capture life unposed.” In other words, reportage followed a style that emphasized its own complete and objective accounting of events. Kracauer acknowledged the popular thirst for reportage, noting the desire among his readership for simplicity and directness. This, he suggested, was a consequence of the “malnutrition caused by German idealism.” Nevertheless, despite the goal of reportage, Kracauer argued that it failed as a form of representation adequate to the reality it aimed to capture. In his book The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, he noted that reportage
[…] merely loses its way in the life idealism cannot find […] Reality is a construction. Certainly life must be observed for it to appear. Yet it is by no means contained in the more or less random observational results of reportage; rather, it is to be found solely in the mosaic that is assembled from single observations on the basis of comprehension of their meaning. Reportage photographs life; such a mosaic would be its image.
Kracauer’s critique of reportage rests upon the claim that “reality” is never more than a “construction” of perspectives. Reportage “loses itself” in reality—or rather, fails to leverage insight about that reality—because it offers up only one perspective as “life unposed.” The risk with reportage, Kracauer warned, was the reproduction of a singular perspective as univocal reality. An effective representation should not simply reproduce and reaffirm a singular perspective on a subject. Rather, an effective representation should illuminate the “mosaic” that inevitably arises from the various viewpoints of the different people whose lives are bound up with the subject: this is a thought-image appropriate to “life.” To collapse that multiplicity to a singular perspective represses any parties who do not share that singular perspective. Kracauer effectively suggested that reportage—ironically—was the opposite of transparent and honest reporting; rather, reportage functioned as a form of censorship.
While reportage blinkered mass sensibility through writing, the photograph was its visual collaborator; Kracauer dedicated an entire essay to the perspectival problems generated by the medium. “Photography” begins with an allusion to New Objectivity portraiture in its most popularized form: the image of the female celebrity:
This is what a film diva looks like. She is twenty-four years old, featured on the cover of an illustrated magazine, standing in front of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido […] If one were to look through a magnifying glass one could make out the grain, the millions of little dots that constitute the diva, the waves, and the hotel. The picture, however, refers not to the dot matrix but to the living diva on the Lido.
Kracauer suggests the photograph asks us to ignore the diva’s pointillist construction. He asserts her image is in fact made of “millions of little dots,” which is another way of pointing out that “she” is a multiplicity. But, the danger of the photograph is that this assemblage of dots, this construction of the diva—the one that does not employ a “magnifying glass,” the one that blurs and reduces the “dot matrix” into one perspective—this becomes the only version of her imagined possible. Kracauer continues to describe the photo: “The bangs, the seductive position of the head, and the twelve eyelashes right and left—all these details, diligently recorded by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless appearance. Everyone recognizes her with delight, since everyone has already seen the original on the screen.” This photograph serves to confirm the version of film diva the German public already knows. She looks the same on the Lido as she does on the film screen, right down to each of her “twelve eyelashes right and left.” As was the case with reportage, here the photograph of the diva reproduces a singular perspective.
The problem with this singular perspective for Kracauer is, of course, that it frequently only repeats the “tendencies” of the era in which it was made. The photograph of the film diva reflects the dominant aesthetic for young German women in the Weimar era: a perspective that developed out of—among other things—a patriarchal response to women’s new participation in the urban workforce post-World War I; a nationalistic, racist response to cultural and economic “Americanization” and Black American culture after the Dawes Plan; and the possibilities and limitations of celluloid media technology at that moment in time. All of these “dots” are at work in the photograph, pushing and pulling together an image that is intelligible according to the “tendencies” of the era. This woman’s portrait is already overdetermined: contoured by the dominant cultural-aesthetic-schema of youth, femininity, and whiteness in Weimar Germany.
How might the photograph have captured the film diva more authentically? It couldn’t have. How might photo-sharing platforms allow us to consume and compare images of ourselves more honestly on the internet? They can’t. The problem, Kracauer tells us, is the medium itself: a photograph (digital or celluloid) leads us to believe there is an aesthetic reality that exceeds the camera, ready and waiting to be captured “unvarnished.” But all images of bodies are already filtered, they appear to be real only because they already meet a set of cultural-aesthetic expectations for reality. So, what happens if we stop expecting images of bodies to be “real”? What happens if we get curious about what unreal bodies look like? Non-conforming bodies? Illegible bodies? And what if we get curious about the inconspicuous cultural-aesthetic-schemas that sift and ultimately censor our own body images? Kracauer writes that the “liberated consciousness” can shatter our assumptions about “natural reality” through the production of mosaic. Instead of chasing virtue in our modern, digital portraiture, or equating virtue with a form of media that implies a singular perspective, what media can we employ to multiply our ways of seeing bodies, to make a mosaic of them?
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact Alida Liberman.
Summer Renault-Steele
Summer Renault-Steele is Professorial Lecturer in Honors and Philosophy at The George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. from the Philosophy Department at Villanova University. Her first book, Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School, is in the final stage of contract approval with Columbia University Press. Her work has appeared in Evental Aesthetics, PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture and Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. She is also a Forrest Yoga teacher and mother.
