Funny thing about human society: it always seems to be headed to hell in a handcart. The causes and evidence may change over time—from the “penny dreadfuls” of Victorian England, to jazz music, to television, and to the latest culprit: selfies.
According to
Time magazine last month, a new Ohio State University study suggests men who regularly post selfies—particularly if they edit them beforehand—are more likely to show signs of psychopathy, along with narcissism and self-objectification—“a set of personality traits known as the Dark Triad” (Linshi).
As with pretty much every societal malaise over the years, critics focus their concern on young people (perennial culprits in the ongoing downfall of civilization). In a guest editorial for Issues in Mental Health Nursing, University of Tennessee nursing professor Marian W. Roman bemoans the selfie obsession of younger fellow passengers on an Alaskan cruise. Instead of properly appreciating nature all these whippersnappers literally turned their backs to it, preening and posing with cell phones held at arm’s length. “These individual and group selfies trumped any courtesy, social contract, or even common awareness of the other. It seemed to be a generational phenomenon; Seniors, Boomers, and Gen Xers did not seem to indulge” (Roman).
Yes, young people like their selfies, and that worries us. In generations past, we worried about their obsessions with rock and roll, or comic books. Young people occupy the front line of cultural change, and whenever the rest of us fail to keep up with them we place the blame on them, not on ourselves.
I would argue that selfies are merely the current expression of our innate desire to affirm and document our existence in time and space: Look at me. This is where I am right now.
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| Photo: Mariano (2000) |
It’s not a new tendency. More than nine thousand years ago, in Argentina’s
Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands), people used their own hands as stencils, spraying paint onto cave walls to record their handprints. We can’t tell exactly what they were thinking, but it may have been something perfectly simple: “I was here, and this is my hand.”
In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh took his love of self-portraits one step further when he began exchanging them by mail with fellow artists, including Paul Gaugin and Émile Bernard (“
Self Portraits”). Sure, it was an inexpensive way to build a collection of artwork, but it’s interesting that Vincent was mailing self-portraits rather than starry nights or sunflowers.
In short, we have always loved to share visual depictions of ourselves with others—to be both creator and subject—using whatever artistic medium available to us. The difference now is the incredible ease with which we can create and distribute those images. With the arrival of the Internet, digital imaging, and social media, selfies aren’t some kind of aberration; they’re an inevitability.
Oh, right—I’m supposed to be using this blog to critically evaluate examples of selfies. I better get down to it.
Joseph Byron/Byron Company/Museum of the City of New York
What was that I was saying, about selfies not being a new phenomenon? In 1920, a group of photographers posed on the rooftop of their studio building for the photo (with one of them stepping out to shoot the scene from the side, to illustrate “the way the photograph was made”). It absolutely qualifies as a selfie.
This photo startles us with the familiarity of its composition—apart from the clothing, and the fact that the camera required two outstretched arms instead of one, this group selfie could come direct from Instagram (sepia filter applied).
At the time this shot was taken, photography was still something of a novelty even in New York City. This selfie perfectly captures the giddiness of a group of guys playing with their new high-tech toy. They could have settled on a more traditional portrait, but then one of them would have been missing from the frame.
To me, this selfie says, “The future has arrived, and we’re going to be part of it.” It feels energized, spontaneous, improvised. It’s not a static, carefully composed formal portrait; it’s a moment captured in time. It’s also serves, to borrow
Levin’s words, “as a ‘real-time’ performance of self oriented towards an audience situated elsewhere.”
Over the course of 2012, designer Kyle Warfield took one webcam selfie every day (366 total) and uploaded it as his Facebook profile picture. He approached each selfie as a single frame in an improvised animated movie—matching his pose from the previous day and then modifying it slightly. At the end of the year he had a hugely entertaining animated GIF, which he also turned into a
photo flip-book for sale.
By doing so, Warfield simultaneously embraced and subverted the selfie genre. “I sought an alternative to the faceless stagnation I observe in online profile pictures—motivated in part by the banality of popular selfie memes, the omnipresence of the duckface, the ubiquity of Facebook users consistently applying the same gestures in every photo of themselves, and so on.”
When I saw this selfie (okay, 366 selfies) it hilariously brought to mind the
Horning reading — “always changing with each image, as opposed to a static ‘real self.’” Nothing static about Warfield in this selfie. He literally portrays himself from every side, and with every conceivable facial expression—from neutral to goofy to grotesque. He even depicts himself drooling on his shirt—something that everyone can identify with, but few would deliberately display.
I’m nowhere near this creative, but, like Warfield, I do try to use selfies to express my own constantly changing nature.
