facebook: friends

Thanks to Facebook and other social networks, the traditional private photo album is now a global business card. The photographer Nicolaus Schmidt selected 250 photographs from the numerous ones posted by his Facebook friends from all over the world in order to present their individual lives. He has created album pages with these images, displaying families, friends, passions, dreams, personal life stories. Personal portraits are the focus, often shots of the entire body. These range from pictures taken by mobile phones to carefully styled presentations of the self. In an analytical essay, Barbara Uppenkamp examines iconographic echoes of pop culture as well as themes taken from Antiquity, portrayed in many of these images.