What Is My Image For? Notes from the Era of Professional Avatars

There is a tiny irritation I have been carrying around lately, and because irritations are sometimes useful little cognitive alarms, I decided not to dismiss it too quickly.

It appears when I open LinkedIn and not just here, and encounter, again, yet another professionally polished portrait placed in front of a thought, a statement, a reflection, a piece of advice. Not beside it. Not occasionally. Almost as a required visual escort.

I see a numerous pictures of people, mostly widely unknown with a carefully composed face. A blazer. A confident half-turn. A soft smile, or a serious gaze into a future slightly above the camera. And below it, a sentence that may be wise, harmless, recycled, obvious, or genuinely good – but which now arrives already wrapped in a visual instruction: receive this through me.

Instantly I can feel in me rising a small mutiny … I don’t want to see you anymore, nor do I want to listen to what you have to say because repetitively you are trying to manipulate me with your perfectly polished pictures like you know it all… and I know that that may not be you but the mask you wear for the online world – your professional avatar.

And I find myself asking:

Why?

Not because people should not show their faces. Not because professionalism should be disembodied. And not because I do not understand visibility, recognition, or personal branding.

But because I have started wondering what the image is doing to the message and, perhaps more uncomfortably, what it is sometimes doing instead of the message. What are you hiding?

And why, when I know the person behind it, do I sometimes feel that the image is not there to reveal them, but to replace them?

And then, just a digression, a question bumped in my mind – what happens with their reality when they see them selves in the mirror in the early morning – does the distortion of reality they feed actually help them have a better image of themselves? What is the residual signal they leave to be found in unwanted reflections? But that is all another story and for another time.

Maybe, I tell myself, I am being unnecessarily irritable and unfair. Maybe other people experience those images as warm, human, inviting. Maybe I am reacting to a visual habit that others experience as harmless, effective, even generous.

Maybe they help create trust. Maybe they make the digital space less cold, less abstract, less crowded with faceless opinions and carefully formatted expertise.

And perhaps all of that is true.

But then I have to remember that this discomfort did not begin yesterday, nor did it begin with LinkedIn. It has a much longer professional history.

For more than twenty years, through different HR roles, selection processes, hiring decisions, interviews, shortlists, disappointments, unexpectedly brilliant candidates and wonderfully misleading first impressions, I have watched what happens when too much information enters the room too early.

And photographs on CVs were always part of that question for me.

Whenever I could choose, I preferred CVs without them. One without a photograph, without age, without marital status, without information about children or a horoscope sign with ascendant.

Not because those things are shameful. Not because they are unimportant in a human life. Not because a person should somehow arrive stripped of, what they consider their relevant, biography.

But because, in the first stage of selection, I wanted something else to arrive first.

I wanted to be surprised.

I wanted the professional story to reach me before the face did. I wanted to notice the logic of someone’s path, the shape of their experience, the decisions they had made, the skills they had accumulated, the words they use, the strange turns that suddenly made sense, the inconsistencies, the signs of seriousness, growth, persistence, capacity, their patterns… All that – before my own mind, like every human mind, begins quietly constructing a person from visual and biographical cues that may or may not have anything to do with the work.

Because once a face is there, we do not simply register a face. We start the interpretation: we read warmth or distance, confidence or stiffness, maturity or youth, familiarity or strangeness, fit or non-fit… and all other things we are not so proud of. We may not say it aloud; we may not even notice ourselves doing it; but the human mind is very fast at turning a visual signal into a story.

And once a story begins, the CV is no longer entering an empty room. It is entering a room where an impression has already taken a seat.

And this, of course, is not only a recruitment problem – it is a human perception problem.

At a recent Mentalna gimnastika gathering, in a conversation about communication, perception and the way we so easily mistake our interpretation for reality, we kept returning to one of those ideas that sound simple enough to be politely nodded at and then forgotten, although they explain half of our misunderstandings: we do not respond to the world as it is; we respond to the world as it becomes organized inside us.

NLP would phrase one part of that through its well-known premise that the map is not the territory. Psychology has given us many other ways of understanding the same terrain: selective attention, first impressions, implicit associations, confirmation bias, halo effects, schemas, expectations, affective reactions that arrive before a conscious explanation catches up with them.

Different vocabularies, same uncomfortable truth: between what is presented to us and what we believe we are simply “seeing,” there is an entire internal process of meaning-making.

A face on a CV does not enter the mind as a neutral pixel arrangement. A professional portrait in front of a post does not remain a harmless decoration. And a polished image, a certain posture, a carefully chosen facial expression, the practiced angle of the body, the almost identical emotional temperature of hundreds of “authentic” professional images… all of it lands somewhere, activates something, organizes attention, preconditions reception…

Sometimes it affects us mildly, sometimes helpfully and sometimes in ways we would rather not admit – it carries with it maybe an old visual association to that childhood frenemy or just a casual acquaintance that made us really uncomfortable in the waiting room of the ambulance.

That does not mean the image controls us, it means the image participates and becomes part of the map we begin drawing. And here is the part I find especially interesting with all said before: the sender does not fully control that map.

• I may upload a photograph because I want to appear warm, but you may receive it as rehearsed.
• I may intend to look credible, you may read self-importance.
• I may believe I am making the message more human and you may feel I am making the message harder to trust.
• I may think I am showing up, you may sense I am presenting a version of myself that has been polished until it became strangely unavailable.

And neither of us has to be malicious for this to happen.

That is the difficult thing about communication: intention is only one participant in meaning.

The rest is built in the receiving mind.

And here I’m just talking about people we never met, because in another arena things get to be even more complicated.

When we know the person behind the image, the professional avatar stops being merely a polished visual cue and becomes a comparison. A comparison between the person we have encountered in real life –

with all their warmth, rough edges, uncertainty, contradictions, humor, intelligence, tiredness, kindness, vanity, ordinariness, occasional brilliance and occasional complete absence of it

and

the carefully selected version of that person who keeps appearing online, composed, illuminated, stabilized, seemingly untouched by awkwardness, ambiguity or a bad Tuesday morning.

And perhaps this is what a professional avatar really is. Not just a photograph as a photograph can simply be a photograph, but a professional avatar is the image through which we try to be repeatedly received as something:

Competent, wise, calm, deep, trustworthy, successful, approachable, important, visionary, human (but not messy), confident (but never unpleasantly so), authentic (but in a way that has clearly been approved for publication), etc.

Not necessarily false – that would be too easy, and often unfair. But it is chosen, prepared, curated and repeated. It is a visual condensation of characteristics we want associated with us, a controlled little signal sent into the world to say: this is how I would like you to read me before you read anything else.

And again, that is not automatically a problem because: we all manage impressions, we dress differently for different rooms, we choose profile pictures, we decide which parts of ourselves enter which contexts… at that, alone, professional self-presentation is not a crime against authenticity; in many ways, it is simply part of functioning in a social world.

But paired with frequency, placement and repetition – the game changes.

When professional portraits begin, as we would say where I come from, “da iskaču iz paštete” – jumping out of the pâté – or popping in front or as a background of every post, every quote, every educational fragment, every modest piece of advice, every borrowed sentence now upgraded with a blazer and a soft editorial gaze, then the image changes its function.

It no longer says only: there is a person behind these words.

It begins to say: before you meet the thought, meet the version of me I have prepared for your perception. You are well served.

And for me, this is where the mechanism starts turning against itself. The more insistently the avatar appears, the less curious I become. The more frequently it asks me to look, the more I want to scroll past. The more carefully it tries to prepare my reception of the message, the more I begin to resist being prepared.

Not because I reject faces, not because I reject visibility and or because I believe professional communication should be bloodless, bodiless and anonymous. But because repetition is also communication and one of the things repeated professional avatars communicate to me is this: the image has started doing too much work.

Maybe the thought underneath is excellent, maybe it is genuinely useful and maybe there is something I would have gladly read, considered, even appreciated or participated in…

Alas, I may never find out, because the avatar has become a filter. Not the one the sender intended, perhaps, but the one I now use.

I skip.

That brings me back to the question I started with:

What is my image for?

Is it there to support a message? To help connect a face with a body of work? To make space warmer where warmth is meaningful? To remind people that a real human being stands behind the words?

Or has it slowly become a substitute for substance, a rehearsed visual promise of qualities I want attributed to me, a professional avatar repeated so often that it begins to obscure what it was originally meant to reveal?

Because images do speak and they are “worth more than 1000 words”. But so is their frequency, their placement, the sameness of the pose, the sameness of the gaze, the sameness of the carefully practiced version of presence that keeps reappearing, asking to be received as sincerity, depth, authority or trust.

And maybe the most useful question is not whether we should show our faces in professional spaces, of course we will and sometimes we should.

The more interesting question is whether we still know when our image is serving the message and when the message has quietly been recruited to serve the image.

Because there is a difference between being recognizable and being visually unavoidable. There is a difference between giving a thought a face and placing a face in front of every thought.

There is a difference between presence and repetition.

And there is, I suspect, a point at which the professional avatar we built to help people notice us becomes the very thing that teaches some of them to look away.

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This text was originally published on LinkedIn as part of the Invisible Bridges newsletter and is republished here as part of my professional blog archive.