My favorite emoji is probably the one I don’t use.
Emojis are useful, yes, in the same way plastic cutlery is useful: quick, clean, disposable, and slightly depressing if you think about it for more than seven seconds. They arrive already emotionally assembled. A tiny yellow face tells the world what you are supposed to feel before you have had the decency to feel it properly.
The problem is not the emoji. The problem is the abuse. A sentence followed by seven little faces begins to look less like communication and more like a hostage note from a phone keyboard. Joy, sadness, irony, tenderness, embarrassment: all flattened into a municipal catalogue of approved reactions. Human beings spent centuries inventing literature, painting, photography, music, silence, the raised eyebrow, and then decided that a winking yellow circle would do the job. Sensible species, obviously.
So, no, I don’t have a sacred top ten. I can tolerate a few. The skull, because at least it admits everything is ridiculous. The black heart, because it has the courtesy not to pretend. The camera, naturally, because some clichés pay rent. But my favorite remains absence: the blank space where the emoji could have been, forcing the sentence to stand on its own two miserable legs.
This photograph says it better than I can. Sunglasses, cigarette, phone, menu behind me, the face of a man apparently being held against his will by modern communication. No emoji required. The expression is already doing the dirty work.
More portraits here.
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