“I Deleted the Photo Anyway” by Gina Len

It took twenty-three attempts to take a photo that looked effortless.

In the first one, my eyes were closed. In the fifth, I hated my smile. Around the tenth, we changed the angle because the background looked too crowded. By the fifteenth, my friend was getting impatient.

Eventually, we found one.

It looked casual, which was funny because almost nothing about taking it had been casual. I adjusted the brightness, cropped out someone behind me, and stared at the photo for another ten minutes before deciding whether to post it.

Social media gives us an unusual ability: we can meet ourselves before everyone else does.

We choose which version gets introduced to other people. We crop, brighten, retake, filter, and delete. None of these decisions seems particularly important on its own. But after hundreds of photographs, I wonder whether they slowly teach us something about which versions of ourselves deserve to be seen.

What happens to all the rejected versions?

They are technically more real. They contain the awkward smile, the bad lighting, the moment before I realized the camera was pointing at me. Yet these are precisely the versions nobody sees.

Sometimes I wonder whether this changes the way we remember things, too. When I look back at old photos, I often remember the photograph before I remember the actual day. The image becomes evidence of how happy, beautiful, or interesting that moment supposedly was.

That afternoon, I posted nothing. Eventually, I deleted the “perfect” photo too.

At first, it felt strange to have spent so much time creating something that nobody would see. But months later, I can still remember that afternoon clearly: what my friend said, how cold it was, and how hard we laughed between photographs.

Strangely, the memory feels more like mine because there is no picture telling me what it was supposed to look like.