A Graphic Guide to Facebook Portraits

With the release of The Social Network, we’re experiencing a renewed interest in the gold-standard of profile makers. And the single biggest indicator of one’s digital personality? The profile pic.

Fast Company has sought to identify and organize the variety of these photos: “Like all art forms, Facebook portraiture has its own lazy tropes—the laptop camera shot, the blue sky background, the blinding flash in a bathroom mirror—but even these thoughtlessly captured snapshots yield unintended insights about their subjects: How is the photo cropped? Can we see the subject’s abs? Why is she giving us the finger?”  

Here, they’ve created a humorous, yet eerily accurate infographic which aims to, “hopefully help you view specific Facebook portraits within the context of the larger genre, and therefore lead to a richer, more complex appreciation of Facebook portraiture as an emerging form of banal, eye-numbing expression.”

A Graphic Guide to Facebook Portraits [Fast Company]