The Three elements to posing

Posing when having your picture taken is natural, it is behaviour that everyone does.  It can be as simple as making a smile or straightening your back and squaring your shoulders.  It’s all about looking good in front of the camera, about producing a good image that will be captured for all eternity, something for people to remember you by in the future.  So, you need to present a good image of yourself, something you can be delighted with, and something that you can look at later with a proud fondness that this is how you appear to other people. 

However, to get to the stage of where the image is taken, one that presents you in a good way, of not looking too proud as to be conceited or too humble that you appear weak and feeble, is a process that happens in a split second.  But in that split second, in that moment where you square your shoulders and inflate your chest, a number of processes happen that we are unaware of but follow impetuously.

In total there are three main elements that influence how we present ourselves, how we transform ourselves into an image.  All of the three processes are from the science of sociology, curtesy of Erving Goffman, Gabriel Tarde and Charles Cooley.  These three gentlemen identified the three foundational principles that this thesis discusses, and they are the frontstage performances, the methodology of imitation and finally the looking glass self theory. 

Starting with Goffman and his notion of frontstage performances will help to explain how we present ourselves when performing to an audience.  Goffman was instrumental in producing a sociological perspective which focused on the individual and how they interacted with society, a branch of sociology that was to become known as Symbolic Interactionism.  It is from his influential book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that the concepts of a Frontstage performance is drawn from, which represents the first steps in producing a pose and transforming yourself into an image.

Goffman approached how people behaved to being similar to an actor playing a role and refers to them as being performers making a performance for the audience.  This would mean that people would behave a certain way when it is expected of them, and even though they are rather dated, the examples he offers do still hold weight as “we know that in the service occupations practitioners who may otherwise be sincere are sometimes forced to delude their customers because their customers show such heartfelt demand for it… these are cynical performers whose audience will not allow them to be sincere.” (Goffman, 1959)

Basically, there are two types of performances, a frontstage performance and a backstage performance, with this thesis concentrating on the former and not the latter.  The frontstage performance is “what we do when we know that other people are watching or are aware of us.  It’s how we behave and interact of when we have an audience” (Pullem, 2017). So, when we are striking a pose we are aware that we are being observed, of people paying us attention, but also are aware that people will look at the photograph in the future and that the audience, even though it is undefined, could potentially be millions and millions of people. 

So, we pose.  We unconsciously start to produce a performance to manufacture ourselves into an image that creates a good impression.  The person becomes an actor playing a role in the hope of managing people’s impressions of them, to ensure the audience views them in a good light and think kindly of them.  But, in a sense, this is a habitual or even a subconscious reaction to having a camera pointed towards you, a behaviour that can feel almost instinctual.  An almost natural reaction to having your photograph taken, an attempt to produce a demeanour to impress our audience. 

So, producing a frontstage performance is one of the steps taken when posing, but how do we know how to behave?  This brings us to the second part of posing, which is imitation. 

The pioneer of studying imitation was Gabriel Tarde, a French academic who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology.  Whilst Tarde was working as a magistrate, he noticed that people would copy criminal behaviour, such as performing a crime in a certain way that had been previously successful by other people.  By recognising this behaviour Tarde was able to identify how people would imitate actions on a microlevel, such as smiling when other people smile, or nodding when everyone else was or applauding altogether spontaneously.  By effectively copying other people’s behaviour, a behaviour which had garnered some benefit, would then hopefully lead to the same result previously and the same benefit would be replicated for the person copying that behaviour.  It was these micro gestures that would be imitated when someone wanted to fit within a certain social group and by adopting these gestures would then be seeking acceptance by the group.  Indeed, the far reaching consequences of imitation was noted when Ellwood, a contemporary of Tarde, asserted that “Tarde declares that all the activities of men in society, from the satisfying of simple organic needs to the inventions of science and art, are in one way or another outcomes of the process of imitation.” (Ellwood, 1901)

With imitation being so widespread it becomes understandable why this behaviour does seem to be so natural.  As Tarde continued his work, he started to think that this behaviour is almost instinctive because it is so natural for people to perform and can be so beneficial.  Also, Tarde was not alone in thinking this way as George Mead had noted the instinctive quality of this behaviour, that is seemed to be a natural phenomenon rather than something that was learnt, especially as it was visible in babies and young children.  This was mainly displayed within the social interaction as “infants respond to others only in terms of imitation.  They mimic behaviour without understanding underlying intentions.” (Macionis & Plummer, 2012)

So, when producing a frontstage performance the gestures are not genuine but are an imitation.  The smile is produced not because the person is genuinely happy but it is produced because it is what the person does when they want to look happy.  It becomes a simulation that, if done well, can convince the audience of genuine happiness but if the imitation falls short of being convincing then it can look false and strained, part of a front that fails to convince. 

It is this behaviour that leads into the final element of posing, which is the Looking Glass Self Theory as proposed by Charles Cooley.  In this theory Cooley examines how the personal behaviour of an individual is modified to be socially acceptable, and he summarised this theory with the following three principles.  Cooley states that “a self idea of this sort seems to have three principle elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.” (Cooley, 1902).

The importance of this theory is that it modifies how we pose because of the elements of self-reflection within the theory.  We produce a pose that, for instance, imitates happiness with a smile but when we review the image we get the impression that the smile looks forced and not natural.  So, we try again, but this time we decide to grin instead of smiling and the result leads to a more convincing appearance of happiness.  From this conclusion, we decide that if we think the image looks good and garners some sort of positive reaction from ourselves, then we decide other people will receive the same impression.  In other words we imagine that our appearance to the audience will be similar to our own and fulfils the impression the person is trying to create. 

The next part of the theory is how we imagine other people will judge the image.  At this point of the process we begin to imagine how people are reacting to the image, if they like the image and by how much.  It is at this stage that people start asking themselves those self-reflective questions, based on the imagined reactions of the audience.  In the past it was not straight forward to judge people’s reaction to how you look in the photograph, but with the invention of social media, the process has become much more influential.  This is mainly because some of the perceived anonymity the internet offers makes it easier to leave either positive or negative comments, or to just click on the Like button. 

This in itself influences people’s imagined judgement of the image.  It can, and does, happen that 20 comments can be made about the image, with only 2 being negative, but the person could concentrate on the two and not the 18 positive comments.  This could mainly be due to a phenomenon known as the negativity bias which confirms that “negative events tend to have larger and longer-lasting effects than do positive events of equal magnitude, an effect thought to reflect an evolutionary adaptation to the relatively greater relevance of threat compared to reward.” (Hilgard, Weinberg, Proudfit, Bartholow, 2014). Consequently, the imagination leads to negative connotations about the image and imagines what improvements could be made to the pose.  Maybe the smile wasn’t big enough, maybe the angle has emphasised an expanded waistline, maybe their hair was unruly and unkempt.  It is the self-reflective questions of this type which help to modify, change and hopefully improve the pose for the next time it is used.

The last part reflects how the person will view themselves based on this reaction and the judgements, either real or imagined.  If the person focuses too much on the positive comments then they can overinflate their sense of self-worth and the person runs the risk of becoming narcissistic and egotistical.  If the person focuses too much on the negative comments then it could lead to issues of low self-worth, which in turn could lead to anxiety and depression.  To form a sense of self, of who we think we are, entirely based on the judgements of others can lead to a shifting sense of selfhood that changes depending on which social group we are attached to. 

Balancing the social sense of self with a form of personal identity is the key to counteracting this effect.  When it is a case “that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality.” (Goffman, 1959) it then can be delusional and harmful. It is important to always remember that even though you can act confident and happy in front of the camera, this is just an act, a performance, a transformation from being normal to being spectacular. 

So, how we pose can have far reaching consequences.  To go from just giving a quick smile for when a camera is pointed towards you leads into a process that influences your self-perception and how you imagine you are judged by your peers, shows a pose transforms your self into a socially constructed being that is influenced by the judgement of others.

Bibliography:

Pullen, L. (2017) Erving Goffman – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,  https://lindseypullum.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/erving-goffman-the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life/ (accessed 27/5/2024)

Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. (2021, February 16). Goffman's Front Stage and Back Stage Behavior. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/goffmans-front-stage-and-back-stage-behavior-4087971

Hilgard J, Weinberg A, Hajcak Proudfit G, Bartholow BD. The negativity bias in affective picture processing depends on top-down and bottom-up motivational significance. Emotion. 2014 Oct;14(5):940-9. doi: 10.1037/a0036791. Epub 2014 May 26. PMID: 24866528; PMCID: PMC4172529.