Step Out of the Frame: Portraits of My Friends under Technocapitalism
From 2024 — 2025, I embarked on a project called Step Out of the Frame.
For one year, when I met my friends, I opted out of group pictures. Instead, I clicked solo phone portraits of them in their most human form. In this essay, I explore the suspension of the self as an act of subversion under technocapitalism, and portraiture as an act of devotion.
Growing up, whenever I met my friends, we took pictures together.
My process was a practiced one. I teased my hair, bit the insides of my cheeks, and tilted my head up to hide a lowly inheritance of two chins. Then, I raised the phone above our heads and angled it downwards, creating the illusion of sculpted cheekbones on narrow faces. When we took pictures with the back camera, I tucked my hips and arms stiffly backwards, warring with the flesh of my mother and her mother. In group pictures, I avoided standing at the very edges of the camera frame, because I didn’t want to become the corpulent victim of barrel distortion.
Then, when we parted ways, a private ritual began.
I dissected my body across photos, scanning my arms, stomach, chin, and legs. I made trade-offs between the thinness of my torso and the prettiness of my face. I hunted for flattering keyframes behind live photos. I assessed which one portrayed me as the sensitive and nurturing mom friend, and which one made me out to be a stoic intellectual — because even group dynamics demanded a cross-section. If my best picture included a friend caught mid-blink, I chose it anyway. This was an unspoken social contract — she could forego my good looks for hers on her own profile, too. Anxiety arose when I encountered WhatsApp group photo dumps with stray pictures of me looking unusually grotesque. I was threatened by their existence on phones I could not access, and the potential earth-shattering consequences of my friends’ curatorial discretion. I begged for erasure, angered at their scheming accusations of, “You look fine!” It couldn’t be — it absolutely couldn’t be — that I really walked around the world like that, attacking innocent people with my corporeality.
Once the perfect — or least worst — photo was chosen, it was time to post-process.
In playing fickle games of human and algorithmic perception, I had come to appreciate the effectiveness of subconscious communication. So I edited my photos to be brighter and crisper, adding an orange glow and the Paris filter. This wasn’t a practice in Facetune-esque catfishing. It was something arguably more sinister. I was creating the illusion of a vibrant, saturated life lived in high definition — beautiful and warm and always illuminated.
Finally, I posted the product of this painstaking labour on ironically ephemeral Instagram stories.
I needed someone — anyone — myself — to witness that I had very many good-looking and successful friends. Surely then I couldn’t be an isolated introvert decaying on the hamster wheel of her own mental prison. I had, in fact, a thrilling and enviable social life.
This went on for a decade.
My obsessive behaviour wasn’t peculiar to photography. Over the years, I had developed an unwavering ruthlessness — a surgical precision — that had come to define my personality and elevate my career. I sharpened those edges to become disciplined and analytical and cutthroat and strategic. That is how you win in a technocapitalist world. But I couldn’t compartmentalise what these blades so unforgivingly shredded, so they cut me too. That is how you lose in a technocapitalist world.
When I looked back on those pictures years down the line, they elicited a familiar scrutiny.
Wow, I was thinner than I thought that year.
How much weight have I put on since then?
Did he ever see it on my story?
My hair was so short. Should I cut it again?
I should find that shirt.
These thoughts — symptoms of a sick mind — were so trivial, but held so much power over me.
I had spent my teenage years as a victim of social media, and my early twenties harbouring a profound ache about the deterioration of humanity under technocapitalism. In my mid-twenties, in a desperate attempt at hope, I began to develop an interest in subversive practices that challenged it.
It was an ordinary Tuesday in 2024 when I decided that I would no longer take pictures of myself.
Scrolling through my Instagram story archives, I had encountered a paradox. Revisiting pictures with my friends had become an inexplicably isolating experience. At first, it made no sense — they were right there. But I soon realised that in focusing so deeply on my own posing, editing, curation, and perception, I had erased the memory and personhood of the people I loved. Our photos together weren’t snapshots of warm summer nights, sugary desserts, and cacophonic laughter. They were archives of self-absorption — shrines to the surgical blade I took to my own existence — that had become, in their culminating impact, destructive.
Is the goal of photographing ourselves with our friends to preserve and someday relive memories? If so, I had failed. There was no reliving, because the process of preservation, at each stage, had been corrupted. I had not archived the truth at all — I had archived technocapitalist directives of performance and curation.
I decided that from then on, I would create an archive of reality as I had truly experienced it, and portray my friends as I had truly experienced them.
For that, I had to step out of the frame.
Standing behind the camera, I could capture the time and space that contained our friendship exactly how I had experienced it. Achieving a retroactively accessible mirror to reality required me to remove myself from the equation.
Execution wasn’t straightforward. While taking the first few photos, I discovered that my ritual was not just my ritual, but a shared language. My friends were curating and performing their selves as anxiously and ceremoniously as I was. My camera had become a sort of weapon aimed at them, threatening to show them exactly how they deviated from beauty standards. And so they requested good angles and good sides, tucked their own arms behind their backs, and sucked their own cheeks into their mouths. I requested them, in the quiet evenings of our sessions, to allow me to witness their most raw, real, and unpretentious human selves. I asked them to look into the camera but not pose at all. If they wanted to pose, they could — but that pose had to be as weird and unconventional and true as they were.
On my part, creating a comfortable atmosphere for them to do this required first spending hours having meaningful and intimate exchanges , and then doing the photo session at the end of the day. On their part, they had to do something much more impressive — they had to choose to trust me.
Audre Lorde said, “…the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house.” But I opted to use a phone camera exactly because it symbolises the master’s house. The phone is the gateway to victimhood under technocapitalism. I believe that reimagining its very use in a way that preserves humanity is an act of subversion. This may not be a dismantling force — but it is a step out of the quicksand if you’re drowning.
The resulting photos were unexpectedly haunting, liminal, and evocative. I had not realised, until I saw a collective suspension of performance, collated in my photo album over a year, how rare and unusual the truth is. I chose to play into this aspect, editing the final photos in a cinematic and surreal style. In the process of this project, I understood why our parents and grandparents passed down entire albums of pensive, unsmiling photos. They were not performing — they were just being.
Mary Oliver famously said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” To take these portraits, I had to look — really look — at my friends. I studied how the light reflected off their cheeks and noses, picked lint off their sweaters, waited with them for the sun to set, and generally spent a great deal of time experiencing them without the stain of my own solipsism. I noticed how they interacted with bedrooms and cafés and beaches and parks. I stared at them intently and saw how beautiful they were — not in the way that is leveraged towards social capital, but in the way that flowers and crickets and roots and clouds speckle and decorate the world.
These portraits were more than an archive of reality — they became a form of devotion to the personhood of my friends. And just like that, the Step Out of the Frame project — as haunting as it is — became an ode to friendship itself.
In the end, that fatefully encountered paradox on an ordinary Tuesday was validated. Looking back at these photos, I realise that though I have erased myself, I feel less alone than ever.
