unwitting baldessari’s
I don’t know whether or not you are familiar with the website www.hotornot.com. For those who aren’t aware this is what wikipedia has to say about it
Hot or Not is a Rate Me website that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. Photos are approved by a panel of volunteer moderators, who strive to keep the site “fun, clean, and real.”
Everyone wants to feel good about themselves and get the highest peer rating possible so they try to select what they feel is the most attractive photograph of themselves. Oftentimes the most appealing photographs happen to also include friends, family, and ex-lovers. A system had to emerge in order for the general public to know which person in the picture desires a rating. So far there seems to be three general methods for distinguishing oneself; cropping the image, writing “me” and/or drawing an arrow to oneself, and (least commonly) using whatever drawing program is at hand to mark out those unwanted others in the picture. I stumbled upon this fact while working on this. When I started noticing the erasures I soon lost interest in the project I was working on so I abandoned it. I spent a long time looking at as many pictures as I could stand in order to fish out images which were altered by the user. On top of a very appealing gestural quality these images struck me as kind of violent. They are currently split into two collections. The more interesting ones involving hand done erasures are residing here. There were far more images with an arrow or a “me” on them, but those didn’t hold my interest as much. They are resting in a directory here. In case you don’t have the desire to sift through the directory my favorites from the “me” series are 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5