Me,Myself and iPhone

Smile. At least that was the conclusion of a recent study by OkCupid.com...

Smile. At least that was the conclusion of a recent study by OkCupid.com,the popular dating site for 20-somethings. To determine which factors made a photo more attractive,the staff tabulated the number of interested responses to thousands of pictures,then broke down their characteristics. The findings were intriguing,to say the least. Women responded more often to pictures in which the man is looking off camera,not into it. Men were more likely to respond to pictures in which the woman is at home and looking a little come-hither,rather than out with friends or on a trip. But for both sexes,pictures in which the subjects are smiling uniformly trounced the stone-faced ones.

For pictures of men,especially, said Sam Yagan,a founder of the site,the smile is critical. Good to know.

But what was most striking to Yagan about the pictures was how much thought and effort went into even the most casual snapshots. People are really putting their best foot forward,for complete strangers, he said.

With the debut of Apples newest iPhone,the latest show of vanity has kicked into high gear. With a second camera lens that faces the viewer instead of the view,the iPhone has simplified something people have been struggling with ever since they signed up for AOL more than a decade ago: taking a good picture of themselves. Finally,the iGeneration has a good head shot.

The fine art of self-presentation used to be something mastered only by models and movie stars. People are so much more attuned to adjusting how they look in front of a camera, said Keith Gould,the creator of Daily Mugshot,a free Web site that allows users to automatically upload a picture of themselves daily. Now they make precise decisions about every part of their face and angle of their head.

As a result,the self-snap is fast becoming a vital facet of how we present ourselves. Photographing oneself well is a talent that,like being able to download music via mind control or reduce whole paragraphs to acronyms at warp speed,is now a given for young people. And it is a skill that,if you are single or younger than 50,you cannot afford to neglect.

This really represents the shift of the photograph serving as a memorial function to a communication device, said Geoffrey Batchen,formerly of the City University of New York and now a professor of art history at Victoria University of Wellington,in New Zealand,who has written extensively on historical and contemporary photography.

Story continues below this ad

It came as quite a surprise to Amber Ward,a largely technophobic mother of two who lives in Lower Manhattan,when she found her 3-year-old son,Beckett,playing with her iPhone,as usual.

He was holding it up like he was taking a picture,but he was holding it in the wrong direction, she said. So I went over to take it and show him,but he clutched at it and said,No,Mamame! And he held it up to show me: He was taking a picture of himself.

Basically,what starts off as an exercise in narcissism and image control eventually devolves into something more routine and candid,a chronicle of the same face we present to the world,despite our best efforts at airbrushing our flaws.