Employing strategies of refusal and redaction, American Artist’s Dignity Images examine how social media platforms condition our sense of self, identity, and community. Concerned with the vampiric nature of social media—where user content, data, and engagement generate profit—Artist’s practice proposes ways to challenge platform and surveillance capitalism. One such strategy is in Artist’s own legal renaming, which intervenes in the overwhelmingly white and male artistic canon.

Whereas Artist’s renaming simultaneously claims anonymity and hypervisibility, Dignity Images are rooted in omission and intimacy. Artist defines dignity images as photographs sitting idle on one’s smartphone, withheld from social media circulation. A dignity image represents a conscious choice to mediate between one’s online and offline self; for Artist, it is “a means of recovering dignity outside of social media by acknowledging that images outside of these platforms are equally if not more valuable.”22Artist, “A Declaration of the Dignity Image.” Like photographs in albums or scrapbooks, dignity images are tangible and personal, contrasting the homogenous interfaces of social media platforms.