About

When I Take a Picture of My Friend vs. When My Friend Takes a Picture of Me is a two-pane image macro series illustrating the discrepancy between photographs the meme's author takes of others and the photographs others take of them. The first image shows a seemingly attractive photograph of the author's friends, while the second image shows the subject in an unflattering manner, similar to Expectation vs. Reality.

Origin

The earliest known iteration of the image series was posted on September 27th, 2014 by Twitter ^[1] user @AngelaBrightnes. The pair of images feature the same subject and setting; however, one image is blurry and the other is clear. They captioned the post, "When I take a picture of my friend VS my friend takes a picture of me. . . ."

Spread

Over the next year, the format would be recretaed using different photographs. For examples, on August 20th, 2015, Twitter^[2] user @awkwardsouls posted two images people performing the opticial illusion in which the sun appears to be in their hands (shown below, left). They captioned the photographs, "When I take a picture of my friend vs when my friend takes a picture of me."

On May 29th, 2018, Twitter^[3] user @JeffJoseph96 tweeted a pair of images, one of a shirtless man and another of a man in a green shirt sweating. They captioned the photograph, "Im so mad that I took this picture of reed and this is what he took of me." The post (shown below, center) received more than 116,000 retweets and 495,000 likes in two days.

Following this tweet, more users posted using the format. On May 30th, Twitter^[4] user @lexgts tweeted two graduation photos, one in focus and the other, blurry. The post (shown below, right) recevied more than 630 retweets and 4,900 likes in 24 hours.

That evening, Twitter^[5] published a Moments page about the meme.

On May 31st, The Daily Dot ^[6] posted an article on the resurgence of the meme.

Various Examples

External References