I have a daily routine where I go on a walk at sunset because sunsets are so beautiful. Sometimes, the sunset is so mesmerizing that I try to take a picture. But no matter how many different angles or lighting variations that I try, it never turns out right. The frame is too stifling, and the colors are too muted. The picture is always a poor imitation of the real thing.
It’s possible that I am just a very incompetent photographer. But I think that some real world things are too dynamic to be adequately captured by a camera. More and more, I think that the human face (and human beings in general) is one of those things.
Because of social media, and more recently, the pandemic, the ratio of pictures of human faces to actual human faces that we see has increased drastically. It’s hard to avoid thinking about how we look on camera and comparing that to how other people look on camera. It’s hard to avoid this concept that I’ve recently begun to call, “camera beauty.”
Camera beauty is very specific. It favors a certain angle and certain features, and perhaps that’s why people have adopted certain strategies when taking a selfie, like holding the camera a certain angle above their face and tilting their chin a certain way.
But there are other beauties that aren’t captured by the photos that people post on Instagram. Unlike camera beauty, these are hard to capture in one frame, and these are usually things that we can’t see, and only other people can observe about us. For example, some of the things that I admire in my friends include the presence that they have when they enter a room, or the way that they gesture when they tell a joke, or the way that their faces light up when they’re excited about something.
Frankly, there’s a beauty to the way that people are relaxed and comfortable in a way that they just can’t be when there’s a camera around. The camera makes us so stiff. It forces us to squeeze ourselves into a physical box, and I think it’s started to force my idea of beauty into a box as well.
A photo is static, and it’s just supposed to capture a moment in time. When I start dwelling too much about how I look in a photo and want to strategize about camera angles and whatnot, I try to remember that the more human aspects of beauty are far too complex and dynamic to be captured by a photo.
I’m glad for that. I’m glad that there is more beauty to people than what can be captured by a camera. The picture is always a poor imitation of the real thing.
~Amanda V. Chen ‘21
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