Artist Statement | “In Profile my interest in art history and portraiture meets my fascination (/obsession) with self-representation on dating apps. The project explores topics around queer identity and visibility, documentation and archive, as well as emotional and surveillance capitalism. It was born after the research for my BA dissertation ‘From Carte de Visite to Tinder: the burden of constant self- representation’ at Birkbeck University, and also after my own observations, experiences and reflections on representations of fellow ‘cruisers’ on dating apps such as Grindr or Tinder.
During my research I examined hundreds of dating-app profiles looking for conclusions on contemporary self-representation strategies, aspirations and anxieties, which I then compared to those from 1860s Cartes de visite.
These small photographs (roughly the size of the screen of my iPhone 6) were the first instance of socialisation, and even flirtation, mediated by photographs. Patented by Parisian photographer André Disderi in 1854, Cartes became a very successful enterprise, particularly in the UK and France. The ‘Cardomania’ craze created the need to not only have a portrait of oneself, but also multiple copies of them to exchange amongst family, friends and acquaintances. They inaugurated what Rafael Doctor calls the ‘contemporary culture of ego’, and were also the first instance in which the faces of regular men and women became commodities – they started being used as advertisements of the photographer’s studio.
150 years later, dating-app photographs, our most flattering portraits, are today’s cartes de visite to online love. Of all the dating-app profiles I examined, I became particularly interested and intrigued about those using landscapes images as their profile that some ‘discrete users’ had in the place of the (expected) portrait on queer dating apps. On one hand it makes for the uncanny experience of being chatted up by a waterfall or a palm tree whilst lying on your sofa, but I also feel that this need for ‘discretion’ (/closeting) is also a stark reminder of the mask that queer people have been forced to wear for centuries.
I played with printed dating-app profiles and intervened cartes of young males. As a result, the landscape replaces the portrait and the digital invades the old photograph, illustrating at once the offline-to-online transition and one of its consequences, a certain loss of queer visibility. Apps have supplanted gay bars and cruising spaces, and contributed the slow death of the gay village, queered places like Soho in London, historical spaces of leisure, but also of solidarity and political visibility. The hollow silhouettes of these males replaced by empty landscapes make conspicuous this process of gradual invisibility."
— Javier Hirschfeld Moreno, 2022