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Among the many conversations my post from last week has inspired, one brought to light an interesting phenomenon in digital photographs: the missing arm.

Over the years of visiting online dating sites I’ve seen a lot of photographs of girls. If I had to guess, I’d say that 60% of these photographs only show proof of one arm being intact. The other arm is either unavailable, extremely shy, or (more likely, I hope) wrapped around somebody that she’d like not to be associated with her in this context.

These kinds of images have been manifested by online dating, never before having been exhibited. (Of this I have no proof; this is a blog entry, not a thesis.) Surely, as long as couples have been photographed together and have subsequently broken up, photographs have been cut in two (at times with metal shears). This is a symbolic action, however. The picture-slicer wasn’t going to keep the halves of that photograph around anywhere where somebody (nay, thousands of single-and-looking somebodies) can see it.

As for my own pictures — those I post on these sites — they’re all of me alone. No strangely cropped-off appendages, no foreign fabric creeping into the picture. Just me. True enough, I have spent some 95% of my life single, so I do have mostly photos of myself alone, but as a photo snob composition and framing are important. Even if my favorite photograph of myself were with an ex-girlfriend, I would never consider cutting her out of it and posting it. It’s simply aesthetically offensive.

At the same time I’ve actually encouraged an ex-girlfriend to crop me out of a photo for the purposes of posting on a dating site — even offered to do it for her and save it in an appropriately compressed ready-for-posting JPEG file. If she accepts I may grimace at the finished product, bothered by the unnatural framing and the lack of border space for the subject to breathe, but I’ll do it happily. I’ll be helping a friend and doing my part to perpetuate this new form of portrait.

Aliens may someday spend decades attempting to reverse-engineer and display JPEG images of “singles,” convinced that they haven’t gotten the decoder correct because a large portion of the image is missing. After all, humans couldn’t possibly have such poor compositional skills. Could they?

Posted: Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 at 5:47 pm; Category: Nerd Alert; Comments feed: RSS 2.0.
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