The fine art of self-presentation used to be something mastered only by models and movie stars. Mere mortals did their best for special occasions, like family outings. Then, having a camera phone aimed your way became as much a part of life’s pleasure and pain as ordering a coffee at Starbucks.

Now, with the debut of Apple’s newest iPhone, the latest show of vanity has kicked into high gear. With a second camera lens that faces the viewer (instead of the view), the iPhone has simplified something people have been struggling with ever since they have been online : taking a good picture of themselves. Finally, the iGeneration will have a good head shot.

“People are so much more attuned to adjusting how they look in front of a camera,” said Keith Gould, the creator of Daily Mugshot, a free Web site that allows users to automatically upload a picture of themselves every day.

As a result, the self-snap is fast becoming as vital a facet of how we present ourselves as our clothes, figures or voices. Photographing oneself is a talent that is a given for young people. And it is a skill that, if you are single and under 50, you cannot afford to neglect. It is also changing photography itself.

“This really represents the shift of the photograph serving as a memorial function to a communication device,” said Geoffrey Batchen, a professor of art history at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Even as aesthetic watchdogs wage campaigns to persuade glossy magazines to stop the digital retouching of models and actresses, the word over at Adobe, whose Photoshop is by far the most widely used photo-retouching software on the market, is that more consumers are joining (not beating) them.

But self-consciousness fades fast, as Mr. Gould of Daily Mugshot noticed. “As it becomes part of your life, you just embrace your crazy hair,” he said.

What starts off as an exercise in narcissism and image control eventually devolves into something more routine and candid, a chronicle of the face we present to the world, despite our best efforts at airbrushing our flaws.

As mundane as that sounds, one of the findings of OkCupid, a popular online dating service, was that people respond more favorably to straightforward photos that clearly are taken by the subjects themselves - with, say, the telltale curve of the arm snaking up the side of the picture - than to pictures that are better composed and show them in a more flattering light.

To determine which other factors made a photo more attractive, OkCupid tabulated the number of interested responses to thousands of pictures. Women responded more often to pictures in which the man is looking off camera, not into it. Men were more likely to respond to pictures in which the woman is at home (and looking a little sexy.)

But for both sexes, pictures in which the subjects are smiling uniformly trounced the stone-faced ones.

“For pictures of men, especially,” said Sam Yagan, a founder of the site, “the smile is critical.” But what was most striking to Mr. Yagan about the OkCupid pictures was how much thought and effort went into even the most casual snapshots.

Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, has done studies on the assumptions people make about strangers in photographs.

“What we’ve found is that this stuff is harder to manipulate than you think,” he said. “We’ve done studies with Facebook where we take down people’s impressions of someone’s Facebook photos, then compared those impressions to how that person wants to be seen, and how they actually see themselves.”

The result: They see you as you see yourself, not as you want to be seen. The camera doesn’t lie, after all - not when it really gets to know you.


By DAVID COLMAN