Faces in the crowd

Apple just release iPhoto, its standard photo library, and I can testify that the line wasn’t out the door; the mad rush these days are for handheld devices not the programs that get their contents. The nose pierced clerk who slimness resembled that of an iPhone reassured me that I was the first to get one, She had the bubbly charm of the phone - elegance but brimming self awareness on the boundary of narcism. I while I think she too would handle mutli touch well, as I looked around the store I realized that she is younger than the mac which just turned 25.

The fear that I, even older than the Apple ][ , was exasperated when I went home to use iPhoto for the first time. One of its two main features (the other geo tagging) is that it has face recognition. The program goes through your existing photo library and tries to sort the faces it finds into certain individuals.

There is a theory of animation that it is good that pictures are cartoonish - almost real and we get bothered that it isn’t right, but as an abstraction we are quite fine in knowing that it is a representation - and iPhoto’s face recognition has that creepy almost human feel to it. Using it I could help wonder what iPhoto was thinking as it wandered through my pictures - really he should go to more places than Hawaii? Does he really need to exercise that much? He keeps putting his arm around different girls but they keep looking away? I like to think that iPhoto shares my Woody Allen neurosis.

It certainly was good up to a point - my father gray with glasses was identified correctly in almost every photograph - but the errors were far more fascinating. iPhoto was determined that the larger version of myself was the exact same person as the larger version of my brother; Fat Arthur and Fat Edward were really the same desperately our of shape individuals. it was able to separate the thinner versions of ourselves, but I think it took a small joy in grouping our larger selves. (Somehow I hear it muttering “he should have used a wider angle lens” underneath its electronic breath in the same kind of chirping that R2D2 used when greeting Jabba the hut).

You can click on an individual photograph to say whether it is or is not the person iPhoto thinks it is, and the process becomes a wandering through your history as diets, exercise regimens, gray hair, and pot bellies ebb and flow while the program constructs the platonic you. I had the misfortune of buying a new camera during a rather heavy period and there is an awkwardness in going through all of these photos that reminded me of my college reunion and the pack of high end sorority girls who came back as well.

I was still a math/computer science major on my return which is far better professionally than it is socially. They had such beautiful faces then and even now the remaining hints of prettiness were enough for iPhoto to classify them. But I realize that I enjoy far more the collection of friends that I kept over the years and watching us go through bike rides, weddings, baby showers, and new years parties offset my own self characterization, I felt as I kept wandering through the screens that I was watching us not so much age as live.

In the end I think we are the sum of the smiles we share. And it only cost me $79.00 to have this sorted out.