Documentation of the 9 pairs of jigsaws which make up the project
Bathrobe, a short animation showing possible combinations of one of the jigsaw pairs:
The jigsaws are intended to by exhibited in such a way that they can be handled by viewers. Below you can find a short video showing the jigsaws being handled.
Statement
In Profile, I reflect on the way we change our presentation to signal our (desired) belonging to a specific group, using my old online dating photos and newer photos in paired deconstructed and reconstructed jigsaws to demonstrate the limits of the single image and the way that other people take us apart and reconstruct us from the limited information they have about us.
To fit into a group, we often change the way we speak, dress, act, or otherwise represent ourselves. This is particularly true for the group “good romantic match” in the world of online dating. Even without AI-assisted filters, we make choices about the clothes we wear, the backgrounds we photograph ourselves against, and the activities we show ourselves doing.
This project sprang from a deep dive into my archives, exploring the way I portray myself for others to appeal to different audiences positioning myself e.g. as daughter, student, friend, researcher, manager, singer or dancer. I had in mind Dr David Lester’s (2017) Subself Theory of Personality; that each of us are made up of many aspects, many personalities, any one of which can be at the front of our presentation at any one time.
Along the way, I discovered around 2000 photos from my online dating days, many of which I took as series, using the timer, trying to twist my body to just the right angle, show my face in just the right expression to convey not just my attractiveness, but the many facets of my life and personality.
In Profile, I produced a series of reactions to the self I created and propagated online back then, reflecting on the missing, less polished or presentable aspects of self, in a series of then-now pairs of images presented as jigsaw puzzles that can be reconfigured at will in a reflection of the shifts between the two opposites. Because jigsaws are cut on the same pattern, multiple pairs can also be recombined, giving a picture which encompasses not just one dichotomy, but the multitude of them which make up our personalities.
The jigsaws are intended to be exhibited as they are – puzzles which the viewer is free to take apart and reassemble with their own hands, forcing them to think about how they see them (me) fitting together, resulting in recombined images almost inevitably different to those of the previous or next viewer. In this WIPP, I present documentary photos of the jigsaw puzzles, as well as an illustrative animation, titled Bathrobe, of some of the possible combinations of one of the pairs, and a video showing a pair of puzzles being handled.
As an adjunct to the project, I have also produced the first of a two-part video installation, titled “Profile: A Serial Picture Analysis” which uses many of the around 2000 images from my archive with a critical narration drawn from research by Degen and Kleeberg-Niepage (2023) systemising the different types of images used in online dating profiles. This video can be found below.
References
DEGEN, Johanna Lisa and Andrea KLEEBERG-NIEPAGE. 2023. ‘Profiling the Self in Mobile Online Dating Apps: A Serial Picture Analysis’. Human Arenas 6(1), 147–71.
LESTER, David. 2017. ‘A Subself Theory of Personality’. In Virgil ZEIGLER-HILL and Todd K. SHACKELFORD (eds.). Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer. Available at: https://www.drdavidlester.net/assets/files/encyclopedia-of-personality/A%20multiple%20self%20theory%20of%20personality.pdf [accessed 9 Mar 2025].
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Johanna Lisa Degen, who has given me permission to use the text from her article (with Andrea Kleeberg-Niegage) listed under references above, in the narration to the video installation “Profile: A Serial Picture Analysis”.