A jostling tribe of Asian teenagers commandeer the 6-train car I'm riding, laughing and flirting and politely teasing each other. One of the lower-in-the-pecking-order girls (slightly less fashionably dressed, slightly less pretty) has a digital camera, and poses are posed all over the car: the shot of all their shoes, pointing together in a star, a couple of wide-eyed, goofy poses, two girls kissing the air, the ubiquitous "rock and roll" devil-horns hand-sign. As they took their dozens of pictures (always showing the subject their photo right away, eliciting either a laugh or a wince of pain, do I really look like that?), I wondered if anyone would ever look at them - so many pictures, how could they?
It suddenly came to me that the point wasn't the pictures themselves, but the act of taking them and the showing right after, a supreme self-conciousness and a constant sense of self-as-object - "This is what you look like when I see you, and aren't we having fun?"
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