What would you do if a friend posted a picture you hated online — then refused to take it down!
SHE has at least two extra chins, a misshapen nose and an expression of shocked horror, as though she has just seen her own reflection in a mirror.
No one would dispute that the portrait of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, which is currently hanging in the National Gallery of Australia, is unflattering.
Now, according to reports, Australia’s richest woman has demanded that the picture be removed altogether from an exhibition by award-winning portraitist Vincent Namatjira, whose rather inflammatory response was that he ‘paints the world as he sees it’.
We might not be billionaires, but most of us have shared Gina Rinehart’s painful dilemma. In an era of smartphone filters and photo-editing apps, we are used to perfecting the image we present to the world.
But what happens when someone else posts an unflattering picture of us on social media? Or frames a photograph of us squinting into the sun, spinach in our teeth, 10lb heavier than we’d like to be? What is the etiquette when it comes to requesting someone take down — in real life or online — a ghastly picture of us?
Here, four writers explain how to approach this tangled mix of friendship, ego and modern mores…
HAUNTED BY FRIEND’S BIKINI BEACH ‘TAG’
Susannah Jowitt THE day I became a control freak about my ‘image’ was the day social media introduced the notion of ‘tagging’ — where someone, often on a whim, alerts you to a posted picture in which you feature by linking your name to it.
This, I was soon to discover, required a whole new level of hyper-vigilance.
One summer, a friend tagged me in a photo taken of her and me, lying on sun-loungers, early on in a summer holiday. ‘Not even remotely beach ready’ was the not-very-flattering caption. She wasn’t kidding.
I am sprawled across the photo, occupying most of its bandwidth, bare legs akimbo, all my flesh threatening to burst out and make a break for the border. It wouldn’t be out of place in an exhibition of paintings by Rubens or Lucian Freud. However this was a photo on Facebook in 2014, when most people were posting pictures of their skinny little legs silhouetted against a sunset glowing through their thigh gap with the hashtag #hotdoglegs. The only hashtag that springs to mind here is #filletofbeefenoughforeveryone.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what to be most mortified about.
First indrawn breath: there is now a photo of me out there in a bikini. I would never, ever post such a thing. I wear a bikini to tan my tum, with only trusted friends in attendance, not for any fashion reason and never, ever for a more callous public environment.
Yet here I am in all my two-piece glory, ready to scare the horses in every corner of Facebook.
Second gasp of horror: there’s just so much of me.
I actually have the opposite of body dysmorphia — I swan through life thinking my body looks better than it really does. In mirrors, I always look at myself from exactly the same angle: hands on hips, pelvis tilted forward, legs half-crossed.
I look incredible (literally). After 55 years I have nailed my public pose.
But this... this was the sort of candid camera snap I would never countenance posting. There’s the false summit of my belly then the twin peaks of my embonpoint, towering over an only loosely tied bikini top, like a massive landslip poised to collapse at any moment over the viewer.
Third sigh of despair: my friend had 800 followers even then and, worse, 200 mutual friends with me. There was no escaping this. I asked her to take it down.
She laughed and said, “don’t be daft”. But at least she offered to de-tag me, reassuring me that it would no longer show up on my feed.
At that point I was new to the tagging game and didn’t realise it had already been up for two days. The damage was done. The worst moment was when I realised one of my colleagues at the school I worked in had seen it. Mortifying doesn’t quite cover it — just like the bikini.
The truth is, I am still haunted by the knowledge the photo is out there. The other day, a decade after it first went up on Facebook, it popped up in my friend’s feed as a ten-year memory.
She immediately reposted it — on Instagram as well — with the caption: ‘Those were the days. We didn’t realise how good we had it.’ I couldn’t believe she’d done it again. But actually she’s right. I look at it now and I don’t see the flab. I see the tan and the smile and the fabulous chutzpah of a woman in her 40s wearing a bikini.
So, I message my friend and thank her for slaying this particular demon.
‘I know — we look good,’ she messages back.
That’s a stretch — again, just like the bikini straps — but I’ll take it.
PARTY PASSIONS AND ‘HANGXIETY’ ON FILM
Flora Gill EVERYONE who’s ever drunk has at some point woken up the next day with that hangover anxiety — hangxiety — the ‘Oh God what did I do’ nightmare.
But for my generation, this came with an added horror — the morning after negotiation of social media photos.
Nothing is more millennial than