Shortly after the pandemic plunged Spain into confinement, Josep Maria García received a panic call from his brother-in-law.
“He told me not to worry, but that I should search Google for the phrase ‘the worst person you know,'” Garcia said. “I put it on and it was there, everywhere. I scrolled down and it was my face, my face, my face. I thought what was going on? “
Paranoia dragged him as he struggled to reconstruct what had happened. She had posed for the photo in 2014 while accompanying her brother-in-law, a professional photographer, on a business trip to Barcelona. While his brother-in-law, whom Garcia asked not to mention, was preparing for a photo shoot with an American writer, he asked Garcia to step in so he could adapt to the light.
The photo of Garcia, then 34, turned out well, so good that the couple decided to post it in the Getty Images catalog.
Garcia vaguely recalled that in 2018 his brother had told him that the image had been used to illustrate an article for an American satirical magazine. He had paid little attention then; now, as he explored the internet, he realized that it had inadvertently become a global meme. The image had been used to illustrate a cheerful piece about a nasty colleague who usually talks rubbish for once with a killer observation about politics that no one can overcome.
“You wonder, okay, now what’s going on,” he told the Guardian. “Will people show up here to get to know me? Or do you want to hit me? “
He fought to reconcile his reputation on the Internet with his life in Molins de Rei, a town of 26,000 inhabitants near Barcelona. He was super famous online – a quick search for the phrase “the worst person you know” yields nearly two billion results – but the fact that it was in English meant that few in his hometown or marketing agency where he works they knew. anything about it.
“I was going to work and everything was normal, no one greeted me differently,” Garcia said.
His day-to-day life seldom intersected with his online infamy, until a journalist left clues on how to find him in a series of posts on social media. The messages came from all over the English-speaking world and caused her brother-in-law to remove the photo.
But he had already come to define Garcia online. “I’ve read comments that say ‘he has the face of a Nazi supremacist’ or that ‘there’s no empathy in my look,'” he said. He declined to comment and added with a laugh, “I have a lot of photos with this look, this is my look.”
One of the few people in the world who shares his experience of having a face that precedes them is András Arató, a retired Hungarian engineer who in 2019 made public what it was like to discover that his face was a global meme, in his case “Hide Harold’s Pain.”
“At first it was a shocking experience,” Arató, then 73, told TEDxKyiv. “I did not know what to do”.
Arathon’s first reaction was to close it all by retrieving the stock photos he had taken a year earlier. Once he calmed down, he chose to wait and see. “My only hope was that with so many new things day after day on the internet, people will slowly forget about me,” he said. “I have to say I was totally wrong.”
His eureka moment came when he decided to get his image back, launching his own fan page on Facebook with videos and stories from his travels. Soon the offers of collaboration arrived, transforming Arató into a celebrity in its own right; from a role in a Hungarian TV commercial to a small part in a video about Manchester City.
More than two years after stumbling upon the ubiquity of his meme, Garcia – who described himself as reserved – has accepted his unique status. “It’s not easy. It’s amazing how many millions of visits there are,” he said. “But it’s true that over time, you start to see it differently.”
For years he turned down interview requests and chose to stay out of focus. But in recent months, as he plans to release T-shirts with his meme, he has opened up to a handful of media outlets. He has flatly refused to be photographed, “lest it go viral again,” he told a newspaper, hinting at the scars that continue to linger.
He declined suggestions that his meme might have been harder to accept than others. Instead, he pointed to an online debate over whether the photo depicts him as the worst person or whether he is captured looking at such a person.
However, the adverse association was nailed at home during a recent appearance on Spanish television, when he was greeted with the phrase: “You do not have the face of a bad person.”
The TV presenters proceeded to ask him in a funny way if he could be the worst person they knew, asking him what kind of commission he would charge if he provided face masks during the pandemic or if he would tidy up after a party at a hotel. “Thank you for your sense of humor,” one host said as Garcia proved to be a lovely guest.
He has learned to lean on his sense of humor. “It simply came to our notice then. It doesn’t bother me, “he said.” But that surprises people. Some people ask me, ‘Do you really agree with all this?’ “