So I have a new profile pic

You may have noticed that I have a new profile pic up. Frankly, I was sick of the old one. It was taken five years ago and I’d hate you to think I’m one of those people who keep using a photo from nineteenvoetsek even though I’ve become grotesquely fat and wrinkled in the interim.

Also, I looked way too happy in that other photograph. Looking happy and flirtatious is a total misrepresentation of the facts at hand; most of the time I am deeply cynical about life, the universe and everything, and I wanted an image that did a better job of reflecting that. Hence the professionally photographed and edited pose with the chicken, which makes no sense at all apart from the fact that it was a cool prop and I happen to collect chickens, the carved kind you occasionally find offered for sale on the side of the road. (If any of you are planning to make sly comments about large wooden cocks, sorry, I beat you to it.)

Profile pictures are important, and it’s important to have good ones. Let’s face it, physical appearance is usually the primary initial criterion by which one is judged, after all, and I needed various shots for use in for credentials documents, professional profiles, social media profiles, columns, blogs and covering letters for submissions to literary agents (and, possibly, internet dating profiles. You never know when a come-hither look might come in handy). There are so many ways one can position oneself in a crowded marketplace: classy, reliable, credible; alternatively, quirky and creative or provocative and controversial. It all depends on what you’re trying to sell and the context in which you’re selling it.

Organising new profile pics meant putting myself in front of a camera. Now, I hate being photographed because I am so unphotogenic, but at the same time I’m obsessed with the quest to find a shot of myself in which I don’t look hideous. So there’s an interesting admixture of masochism and vanity at play here — something I suspect is true for a lot of people who aren’t models. One thing I knew was that I wanted a professional shoot so that I would have decent images ready to use as required, and not set up camp in the cave of Trophonius* every time somebody asked for a photo of me.

I chose Kat Grudko partly because she is one of the few professional photographers I know in person (and meeting somebody definitely helps with what is ultimately a very personal exercise) and partly because she’s young and talented and I thought that the opportunity would be more useful for her than somebody more established.

No portrait photography takes place until “the look” has been completed by the makeup artist. I’d heard good things about Cicilia Kaufmann and with nearly 5 000 Facebook friends, she’s so connected she no longer needs to advertise. We discussed social media and marketing strategy while she painstakingly glammed me up, and the extraordinary ecosystem that South African photographers, models and makeup artists have set up on Facebook will be the subject of another entry.

The shoot itself consisted of three parts: on location at Cerise, a gorgeously decorated coffee shop in the Bryanston Shopping Centre (and coincidentally in the exact same spot, geographically speaking, that I invited a few friends for my 10th birthday, not that that has anything to do with, well, anything really); next to an unpainted brick wall in Kat’s back garden, and in her studio. Funnily enough, the crowded coffee shop was a lot easier to handle than the garden; my eyes proved sensitive to sunlight that I battled not to squint, frown, or generally look like an escapee from The Best of Police File: The David Hall-Green Years. How Kat was not reduced to incoherent blubbering out of sheer frustration I don’t know, but patience is clearly a critically important virtue for anybody interested in pursuing a career in this aspect of the visual arts. In the studio, I made sure I got the sort of uncontroversial head and shoulders shots that are required by the corporate world and then I brought out the chickens.

Do not seek an explanation for the chickens. As Freud himself once noted, sometimes a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.

After the shoot come the jpegs, which I examined with exhausting attention to every terrifying detail in order to select shots for further editing (or, in more popular parlance, Photoshopping). This is the really scary part, because going through photographs of yourself is forced confrontation with a lot of those aspects of yourself that you hate and — yes — the awful revelation: this is how others see you a lot of the time. Kat should be considered for beautification by the Pope — hey, he needs distractions — for performing the miracle of catching me, more than once, at an angle where I didn’t look cross, confused or burdened with the cares of a cruel and heartless world.

At the end of the process, I have a collection of edited photographs ready for use in a variety of career-advancing situations. I’m very glad I did it, and I’m thrilled not to have to worry about this for the next five years. When I’m fat and wrinkled I’ll go through the exercise again. Until then, these are the versions of me that will be in circulation.

*A very cool synonym for despair which I have only just discovered, and which I intend to use again in future.