“Just send me the fucking photos!”

I hate asking for those pictures you took of me.

The CW obviously

Deep in my Facebook archives sit some of the thirstiest posts you’ve ever seen. Underneath the thinly-veiled lyric statuses and attempts to court a sophomore by commenting pure millennial cringe on all of his pictures sit 80,000 variations of the same pleading Facebook wall post: “Upload the pics plzzzzzz.” 

Back then, what I bafflingly meant by this was, “Please upload the 200 photos you took at the sleepover last night, making sure not a single accidental blur or terrifying red-eye shot is spared, preferably all in an album titled something that will read as incredibly offensive in ten years. And then tag my government name.” Back then, each precious tag felt like accumulating proof of life in my Pokédex of Facebook Photos. And all that stood between me and 15-30 individual hits of dopamine was one lazy friend and their digital camera. I can’t imagine what my fourteen-year-old self would think if I told her the same goddamn obstacle still plagues me to this day.

So much has changed with our relationship to photos. These days, if a mutual uploads 200 photos from a single night, I’m doing a wellness check. Facebook albums have given way to single Instagram grid pictures, which have yielded to chaotic Story posts and “dumps” mingled with Reels. I’ve changed, too. I’m supposed to be an adult—someone who should be “starting a family,” not wondering “how to word a text to a friend asking if she could please send the photos she took where I am fitting my entire self into a particularly large tote bag.” 

Does she not know? Have we not all agreed what all this is for? Somehow, despite our phones becoming all but fused to our hands and social media’s all but omnipresent role in our lives, this is a piece of digital etiquette we’ve failed to codify. Far too often, your friends and mine are out here nicely offering to take pictures of each other in chic lighting and cute outfits and then DOING NOTHING WITH SAID PICTURES. It has become a great and terrible charade. Just send me the fucking photos! You would want the same. 

It’s a double-bind, really, because we’ve also failed to normalize wanting them. It feels humiliating to ask my friend to send them to me, to cop to an unspoken vulnerability (“I’d like to look at myself in case I look hot”) the same way buying a toilet plunger at 2 a.m. at the bodega alludes to urgent, obvious disaster. 

But to not ask is to let the anticipation eat at me to the point of insanity. I cross the threshold into “weird” real fast, reworking things like the aforementioned tote bag into conversation, or holding my hair in a familiar pose again in hopes of reminding said friend of their most important modern social obligation. And so my thriving Instagram presence is forced to rely on a performative dance that requires such cosmic events as “friend offering to take a pic,” “friend sending the pic,” and “me actually liking it” to align without any direct orchestration or intervention from myself. It’s exhausting. But I know that while I may be suffering, I’m not suffering alone. 

But we, the people, have the power to change this universal annoyance. And so I come to you not simply out of basic duty to give voice to the voiceless in times like these, but with a proposal in mind for a new social contract. Which is this: Going forward, if you offer to take a picture of someone, you must send the pics. Immediately. Should you fail to honor this contract, then I am owed compensation. Preferably in the form of an additional photoshoot, taken on my phone, at no point during which you’re allowed to say “haha I think we got it.” I’ll be the judge of that. —Milly N. Neal