This weekend I did a solo day trip to Antwerp and had a blast at the KSMKA museum. Walking through the rooms, I ended up in one filled with portraits, with the following description:
KMSKA, Antwerp
I immediately thought about Instagram and how we always curate what we want to show on social media. The other day my friend was excitedly counting down the days to make their September dump and showing me all the fun things they did in the past month. Funny enough, a lot of the pics didn’t show their face, which made me think about how photography and phones changed the way we associate images and ownership. If someone posts something on their story, have they really done it?
There’s a meme me and my friends really like which is basically posting someone else’s pictures pretending it’s our own. Back then it was easy to manipulate paintings as they weren’t actual representations of what happens in real life, but now, with AI, phones and social media it’s really easy to fake having a life that you don’t live.
We reference this post all the time
It made me wonder: how different are we really from the people in those old portraits? Back then, sitting for a portrait was a statement, showing off wealth, importance, or identity. Today, we do something similar every time we post a photo on social media. We’re constantly crafting versions of ourselves, curating what we want others to see. Either a fun day, a fancy trip, a cute matcha latte or a cause that we really care about.
The room full of painted faces suddenly felt very familiar. Some looked proud, others distant, but all had been composed intentionally, just like our grid posts. The medium has changed, but the desire to be seen, remembered, and interpreted in a curated way hasn’t. We all want to be remembered as an idea we have of ourselves, but is that really who we are?
Walking out of the museum, I couldn’t help but reflect at the overlap between the art I saw and my camera roll. Maybe our “September dumps” are a modern gallery, composed of a collection of carefully selected moments meant to say something about who we are, or at least who we want to be.
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