What compels the 70 million active Facebook users to pick -- or not to pick -- a particular profile picture?

“It’s this aspect that people choose this one image that really fascinates me,” said New York-based artist, Paul Campbell. “They’re essentially self-portraits that I project, and the projection itself distorts them, but it turns them into this painted object that makes them different from the quick image one might view online.”

The giant portraits, which average about 142 by 142 centimeters (56 by 56 inches), each have their own story. 

Facebook may or may not exist in a few years, Campbell said, but paintings are fairly archival. Still, when one of his younger subjects enthused he’d been “immortalized” in a portrait, Campbell said that was a “bit of an overstatement.”

“But there’s something about the permanence in the association of painting, in taking this really transient image on the Internet.”Read more