1

Selfies and Self-Portraiture

Nigel Chuk Yin Ip

April 2015

School of Arts

University of Kent, Canterbury

BA History & Philosophy of Art (Hons)

Independent Project (ART500)

Project Type: Dissertation

Word Count: 8371

Supervisor: Dr Ben Thomas

Academic Adviser: Professor Martin Hammer

2

I would like to acknowledge the following people and academics for their

advice throughout the duration of my research:

Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston, TX)

James Hall (Author of The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History)

Dr. Mariann Hardey (University of Durham)

Prof. Tom Henry (University of Kent)

Dr. Jon Kear (University of Kent)

Dr. Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of Kent)

Dr. Grant Pooke (University of Kent)

Prof. Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld Institute of Art)

Dr. Ben Thomas (University of Kent)

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Selfies and Self-Portraiture

Introduction

The selfie phenomenon has become a media sensation within the past few years, occupying news

articles, blog posts, and the cell phones of individuals. On November 19, 2013, the word ‘selfie’ was

announced by Oxford Dictionaries as their Word of the Year 2013, based on its huge attraction of

interest in that particular year.1 Added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August 2013, the earliest usage

of the word can be traced back to an Australian online forum in 2002, but its widespread popularity

didn’t begin until roughly a decade later. Nowadays, it has become a mainstream term adopted by

the media, leading to the discontinued television programme Selfie,2 and consumerist culture, in the

form of selfie sticks and selfie hats.3 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the selfie as the following:

A photograph self-portrait; esp. one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social

media.4

There have been many attempts to place the contemporary selfie in the context of traditional self-

portraiture, inspiring a “Selfies in Art History” exhibit at the University of Louisville,5 with some even

asking if the selfie could become art.6 With exhibitions placing selfies in a gallery context (e.g. the

“National #Selfie Portrait Gallery”)7 and museums adopting the term for marketing purposes (e.g.

1 ‘Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013’, by Oxford University Press, OxfordWords Blog, 2013

<http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/> [accessed 21

February 2015].

2 Emily Kapnek, ‘Selfie’ (American Broadcasting Company; Hulu, 2014) <http://abc.go.com/shows/selfie>.

3 ‘Acer X Christian Cowan-Sanluis’, Christian Cowan-Sanluis

<http://www.christiancowansanluis.com/#!untitled/c9gy> [accessed 29 January 2015].

4 ‘Selfie, N.’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2014 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/390063> [accessed 21 January

2015].

5 Erica Walsh, ‘Share a “shelfie” at the UofL Art Library’s Interactive Self-Portrait Exhibit’, UofL Today, 6

February 2015 <http://louisville.edu/uofltoday/campus-news/share-a-2018shelfie2019-at-the-uofl-art-

library2019s-interactive-self-portrait-exhibit> [accessed 26 February 2015].

6 Sarah Adams, ‘When Does a Selfie Become Art?’, ArtsHub Australia, 9 July 2013

<http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/arts/when-does-a-selfie-become-art-

195950?utm_source=ArtsHub Australia> [accessed 9 February 2015].

7 Eugene Reznik, ‘Off Your Phone and On View: The National #Selfie Portrait Gallery’, Time, 2013

<http://lightbox.time.com/2013/10/16/off-your-phone-and-on-view-the-national-selfie-portrait-gallery/#15>

[accessed 9 February 2015].

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#MuseumSelfie Day)8 it is not difficult to see where such a question comes from. To explore how

selfies relate to the genre of self-portraiture, it is important to distinguish their characteristics and

the motivations underlying their production.

Due to the selfie being a relatively new phenomenon, my thesis is by no means a comprehensive

account of the selfie, simply one way of approaching the phenomenon. The first section will attempt

to detail the social context and motivations behind various types of painted self-portraiture. The aim

of this is to provide a foundation for me to base my analysis of selfies upon. The second section will

identify the key visual features of the selfie, and the third section will explore their context and

motivations of production, largely focusing on the public selfie. The fourth section will then attempt

to distinguish differences between the self-portrait and the selfie, finishing with some concluding

remarks and hypothetical ideas about the phenomenon.

Types of self-portraiture and their social context

The self-portrait was a phenomenon that arose out of two main motivational factors: the artist’s

status in society and a human need for personal salvation.

Ideas about the afterlife dominated the daily life of medieval Christian society.9 There were customs

and rituals detailing how one should die, with particular criteria leading one to a ‘good’ death or a

‘bad’ death. A ‘good’ death guaranteed the individual’s satisfactory continuity into the afterlife.

However, the general public’s conception of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory was very ambiguous, and

naturally everyone wanted to reach the former whilst living in constant fear of the Last Judgement.10

It was believed that being associated with or even touching a holy figure would grant the individual

salvation in the afterlife.11 This led to various cases of pilgrims attempting to touch the bones of

religious figures, notably Sir Thomas à Becket and Edward the Confessor.12 In visual imagery, the

donor portrait accommodated this belief.13

8 Matthew Caines, ‘Museum Selfie Day – in Pictures’, The Guardian, 22 January 2014

<http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-

blog/gallery/2014/jan/22/museum-selfie-day-in-pictures> [accessed 21 January 2015].

9 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: The British Museum Press, 1996), pp. 29-69.

10 ibid., pp. 164-214.

11 Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social

Status of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 44-53.

12 Stephen Lamia, ‘The Cross and the Crown, the Tomb and the Shrine: Decoration and Accommodation for

England's Premier Saints’, in Decorations for the Holy Dead: Visual Embellishments on Tombs and Shrines of

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Donor portraits usually depicted family members witnessing a sacred or worldly event.14 In the

former they are often shown bowing before divinity, offering gifts, or in a state of submission and

prayer.15 Like most art up until the nineteenth century, they were usually commissioned by upper-

class patrons or the elite, often members of very powerful family households, such as the Medici or

the Gonzaga in Italy.

To illustrate the importance of donor portraits to the elite, one may look to the Sassetti Chapel in

Florence. The urban elite in Italy had a particular urge for displaying their wealth and power, partially

accommodated through the patronage of the arts.16 One of the grandest displays in Baroque Rome

was Pietro da Cortona’s Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power (1633-39), a fresco which

filled the ceiling of the grand salon of the Palazzo Barberini.17 Back in Florence, the Sassetti Chapel

was the family chapel of Francesco Sassetti, located within the basilica of Santa Trinita.18 The chapel

was decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from the life of St Francis, executed by Domenico

Ghirlandaio between 1482 and 1485. On the altar wall, the lunette picture depicts the Confirmation

of the Franciscan Rule where a number of portraits can be seen. In particular, to the right of the

image can be discerned the portrait of Francesco Sassetti beside Lorenzo the Magnificent, the most

powerful man in Florence, demonstrating his own status and his family’s close links with the Medici

family.19 Sassetti also gestures with his index finger to identify his three sons on the far side of the

image.20 Another interesting thing to recognise is that the entire scene is set in Florence, instead of

Rome or Jerusalem. The portraits in Ghirlandaio’s narrative are also dressed in contemporary

Saints, by Stephen Lamia and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2002), pp. 39-56 (pp.

42-44).

13 Woods-Marsden, p. 44.

14 Roland Kanz, Portraits, ed. by Norbert Wolf (Germany: Taschen GmbH, 2008), p. 10.

15 Patricia Rubin, ‘Understanding Renaissance Portraiture’, in The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to

Bellini, ed. by Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann (New Haven and London: The Metropolitan Museum

of Art, 2011), pp. 2-25 (p. 3).

16 Kanz, p. 10.

17 Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art & Architecture (London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2005),

pp. 119-20.

18 Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

2000), pp. 93-101.

19 Aby Warburg, ‘Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeosie’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:

Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, by Aby Warburg, trans. by David Britt (Los

Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), pp. 187-221 (p. 189).

20 ibid., p. 193.

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costume. This change in setting and costume make the individuals “somewhere between the static,

isolated donor portrait and the active participant.”21 They are neither portraits in the guise of actors

in a narrative, nor are they donors with explicitly recognisable gestures and poses. They are

therefore informally known as bystander portraits and some of the earliest self-portraits came forth

from this tradition.

The self-portrait inserted into a narrative shows the artist bearing witness to his own creation. This

may be a religious narrative, as in Luca Signorelli’s frescoes at Orvieto where he inserts himself and

the artist Fra Angelico in the Deeds of the Antichrist (c. 1503),22 or an allegory, such as that of

Raphael in his School of Athens (c. 1510-12) in the Vatican.23 Whether some of these self-portraits

were made for posterity or salvation is debatable, but some early images did suggest the latter. In a

manuscript at Oxford, a small, kneeling St Dunstan depicts himself beside a relatively larger figure of

Christ.24 His Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ (c. 943-57) shows the saint touching Christ’s robes and

seeking absolution. A four-line prayer has been inscribed above his own figure, enforcing his fear of

the Last Judgement and his own demise:

I ask, merciful Christ, that you may protect me, Dunstan, and that you do not let the Taenerian storms

drown me [.]25

Other artists used self-mockery to appeal for penitence. In the Last Judgement (1535-41)

Michelangelo portrayed himself as the flayed skin of St Bartholomew.26 St Bartholomew, identified

by his attribute of a knife, also happens to be the figure holding this same piece of skin and he

appears to be appealing to Christ for pity on behalf of the artist.

The story of the painter Apelles and his patron Alexander the Great in antiquity came to be the

pinnacle of the artist’s reputation and served as a goal for many artists for generations to come.27

Some medieval artists, such as St Dunstan, had a very high social status, usually due to their

21 Cadogan, p. 88.

22 Tom Henry, The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 17;

pp. 208-9.

23 Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 78.

24 James Hall, The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2014), pp. 21-24.

25 ibid., p. 22.

26 ibid., p. 110.

27 Woods-Marsden, p. 23.

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adoption of other high status roles.28 Some were also very rich, especially goldsmiths whose use of

expensive and lustrous materials garnered them the highest status. However, the artist’s status in

society varied at different points in time and also in different locations.

In Italian society, the artist had a relatively low social standing due to its associations with

craftsmanship and physical labour, rendering painting and sculpture as mechanical rather than

liberal arts.29 These values had their basis in antiquity, where an education in the liberal arts

distinguished a freeman from a slave.30 An individual’s status was also judged alongside “the status

of their family and ancestry, their circle of friends and associates, membership in associations,

marriage ties, and so on”.31 Leon Battista Alberti was the first to elevate these art forms above the

mechanical arts in his treatise On Painting on the basis that artists be given a firm theoretical

foundation.32 Much self-portraiture of the time responded to this common self-conscious need to

enhance the reputation of the artist.

Unlike altarpieces and ordinary portraits, self-portraits were seldom commissioned.33 They often

functioned as samples to demonstrate an artist’s skill in rendering an accurate likeness of

themselves, allowing the patron to compare the likeness with the artist.34 These were largely made

with the aid of a mirror, known to us in works such as Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

(c. 1524) and Johannes Gumpp’s Triple Self-Portrait (c. 1646).35 The invention and development of

the mirror allowed artists the opportunity to study their own features, initiating the conception of

the artist as his own model. This availability has become increasingly popular with more modern and

contemporary artists and photographers.

Most self-portraiture followed the format of the independent or autonomous self-portrait which

Joanna Woods-Marsden defines as:

28 Hall, p. 21.

29 Woods-Marsden, pp. 3-4.

30 ibid., p. 19.

31 ibid., p. 3.

32 ibid., p. 20.

33 ibid., p. 8.

34 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 215.

35 Hall, pp. 30-49.

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[…] self sufficient easel paintings within whose frame one (on rare occasions two or three) portrait

head or a half- or full-length figure appears – in other words, the isolated self as both subject and

object. The definition also extends to medals and portrait busts.36

One particular case in the fresco medium to imitate the autonomous self-portrait was Pietro

Perugino’s commission at the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia in 1496. Amongst his images of the

Cardinal Virtues and various ancient figures, Perugino also painted a self-portrait set inside a fictive

frame which appears to be hanging from a wall.37 An inscription “PETRVS PERVSINVS EGREGIVS

PICTOR” below identifies him as the painter of the image. Other examples of inscriptions include “As

I can / Jan van Eyck made me on 21 October 1433” on the frame of Van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban

(1433)38 and “In 1498 I painted that from my own form. I was twenty-six years old. Albrecht Dürer”

in Dürer’s Madrid Self-Portrait (1498).39 Other signatures took the form of recognisable attributes,

such as Alberti’s emblem of a winged-eye.40 One could argue that an artist’s style functions as a

signature and this has certainly been adopted in Roy Lichtenstein’s Self-Portrait (1978) where he

replaced his own image with a mirror painted in his iconic Ben-day dots.41

The artist had several ways he could promote himself, the most common being associated with the

upper classes, ideally working as a court painter or having important and powerful patrons. Others

took an approach similar to individuals today: by constructing a public image or identity. From this,

we have two types: the notion of a persona and the authentic self. The notion of the persona refers

to the role or character type represented by a mask in Ancient Greek theatre.42 It was later

associated with the legal rights of a ‘person’ in Roman society – a civil persona was granted to a

Roman citizen and freeman, and not to a slave. On the other hand, the authentic self is an honest

conception of the individual’s sense of self. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive,

evidenced by Rembrandt who utilises personas in his search for an authentic self. Whilst both have

an element of self-discovery, the former is largely playful.

36 Woods-Marsden, p. 1.

37 Joseph Antenucci Becherer, Pietro Perugino: Master of the Italian Renaissance (Grand Rapids, MI: The Grand

Rapids Art Museum, 1997), pp. 11-12.

38 Campbell, nos. 21 and 22.

39 ibid., no. 26.

40 Woods-Marsden, p. 74-5.

41 James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff, Roy Lichtenstein. A Retrospective (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), p.

24.

42 Woods-Marsden, p. 13.

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Many self-portraits show the artist in ambitious states of living. In Dürer’s 1498 Self-Portrait he

depicts himself as a gentleman, rather than a simple artist, alluding to his social aspirations as a

member of high society.43 Signorelli’s self-portrait at Orvieto shows him having already succeeded by

adorning an expensive black cloak as a mark of his local success.44 Court painters like Diego

Velázquez and Anthony van Dyck were particularly conscious of their own reputation, and this self-

consciousness continued with artists like Pablo Picasso. “Rarely a documentary genre, self-portraits

have always allowed us to craft an argument about who we are, convincing not only others, but also

ourselves.”45

Other artists, commonly in the Baroque era, adopted the traditional idea of the persona as a mask,46

therefore a number of self-portraits show the artist in various guises. Caravaggio’s Self-Portrait as

Sick Bacchus (c. 1593) is a famous example of the artist as the god of wine and ecstasy,47 but he also

depicted himself as the severed head of Goliath in David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610), as

remarked by the biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori.48

For other artists like Rembrandt, the authentic self was the image they wished to promote. His early

youthful self-portraits showed a brimming, passionate individual – the same individual who

portrayed himself with pouting ‘duck face’ lips in his 1630 etching Self-Portrait, Wide Eyed – his later

self-portraits show him turning his focus inwards towards his own old age.49 In his Self-Portrait at the

Age of 34 (1640), the artist chose to depict himself in sixteenth-century garments, making references

to some of the greatest artists of the previous century, such as Raphael, Titian, Dürer, and Lucas van

Leyden.50 This mode of expression is repeated in his Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669) where he

wears a fur-trimmed doublet inspired by engraved portraits of Netherlandish painters, reflecting the

fashions of the early to mid-fifteenth century.51 These appear to be attempts to place himself in the

43 Campbell, p. 216.

44 Henry, p. 17.

45 Casey N. Cep, ‘In Praise of Selfies’, Pacific Standard, 2013 <http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/in-

praise-of-selfies-from-self-conscious-to-self-constructive-62486> [accessed 9 February 2015].

46 Woods-Marsden, p. 13.

47 Hall, p. 128.

48 Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Alice Sedgwick

Wohl (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 182.

49 Marjorie E. Wieseman, ‘The Late Self Portraits’, in Rembrandt: The Late Works, by Jonathan Bikker and

others (London: National Gallery Company Ltd, 2014), pp. 37-55 (p. 37).

50 ibid., pp. 39-41.

51 ibid., p. 55.

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tradition of great artists, alluding to Rembrandt’s awareness of his own reputation. This attitude is

also reflected in his Self-Portrait (1658) in the Frick Collection, New York, which shows himself in a

flamboyant garb that expresses his wealth and power, despite being “a proud statement conceived

in defiance of the debilitating loss of the material props of his livelihood and professional

reputation.”52

Alike his contemporaries, Rembrandt also depicted himself in historical personas in two self-

portraits from the 1660s, as the Greek painter Zeuxis and as the Apostle St Paul. Similar to Dürer’s

personal identification with Christ in the ominous Munich Self-Portrait (1500),53 his Self-Portrait as

the Apostle Paul (1661) “may suggest that he empathised particularly strongly with the feeling of

being the unworthy recipient of a great and onerous gift [artistic talent]”.54

However, a number of Rembrandt’s self-portraits depict himself dressed with the accoutrements of

his craft – a canvas, palette, brushes, maulstick, and paint-stained clothes. Most sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century artists did not portray themselves this way for fear of losing their reputation,55

preferring instead to show themselves in a black jacket and white collar associated with upper class

Dutch and Flemish male sitters in seventeenth-century portraiture.56 On the other hand, works that

dealt with the theme of the artist’s studio appear to be an exception to the rule, from Giorgio

Vasari’s St Luke Painting the Virgin (1565) to David Hockney’s Self-Portrait with Charlie (2005).57 But

Rembrandt’s images go deeper than this.

Many commentators of Rembrandt praise him for his degree of introspection and self-awareness.58

His self-portraits appear to be a search for self-knowledge and an understanding of his own identity,

an authentic self, both as an artist and individual in society. To what degree is this true is still being

discussed but few serial self-portraitists have treated themselves with this much self-scrutiny and

supposed honesty. Rembrandt’s images meticulously document his wrinkled, sagging face,

“achieving a realistic and sympathetic rendering of old age.”59 Cynthia Freeland suggested that the

52 ibid., p. 45.

53 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 63-79.

54 Wieseman, p. 51.

55 Harris, p. 342.

56 ibid., p. 341.

57 Hall, pp. 133-34.

58 Wieseman, pp. 37-39.

59 ibid., p. 37.

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nature of some of these images as studies for history paintings and Biblical subjects could account

for their extreme facial expressions.60 By experiencing the emotions of his painterly subjects first-

hand, Rembrandt could represent these emotions in a more convincing light and increase the impact

on the beholder.61

Rembrandt’s succession of self-portraits do not fit neatly in just one category because he re-uses

each mode of expression more than once. In the process of fashioning his own identity, there seems

to be an underlying awareness that there isn’t simply a single self, rather a multiplicity of selves that

is constantly changing and requires updating. Freeland sums Rembrandt’s complexity of self-

fashioning in the following:

First, he was advancing a view of himself as a successful gentleman, at the same time as he was

acquiring commissions, forming a successful studio, setting up a vast household in Amsterdam, etc.

Second, he was both working on, and at the same time more or less arguing for, his status as a

successful artist. Third, he was trying on different versions of himself to see which would fit best. And

fourth, he was exploring his countenance as a way of facing and coming to terms with his own ageing

and mortality, impelled no doubt by the losses he had faced of both wives and of his beloved young

son Titus.62

Finally, there is the category of self-portraiture that emerged from a tradition of commemorative

picture-making: “to mark engagement and marriage, social and spiritual aspirations, and affection

for friends and family.”63 One of the earliest examples is Gerlach Flicke’s double portrait with Henry

Strangwish (1554-5); they were imprisoned together. A Latin inscription above Flicke’s image

translates as “Such was the face of Gerlach Flicke when he was a painter in the City of London. He

painted this from a mirror for his dear ones, that his friends might have something to remember him

after his death.”64 A similar function could be found in the Dutch tradition of group portraits,

typically of members of the various guilds, militias or councils in the country, whose main motivation

was memoria, the commemoration of ancestors by posterity.65 These images appear to be more

explicit with their motivations than the examples I have previously mentioned, all with an awareness

60 Cynthia Freeland, Portraits and Persons: A Philosophical Inquiry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University

Press, 2010), pp. 174-75.

61 Wieseman, pp. 41-42.

62 Freeland, p. 178.

63 Jennifer Fletcher, ‘The Renaissance Portrait: Function, Uses and Display’, in Lorne Campbell and others,

Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian (London: National Gallery Company, 2008), p. 56.

64 Campbell and others, no. 45.

65 Kanz, pp. 15-16.

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of human mortality. A common indicator of this was the presence of a skull, turning the image into

memento mori – reminders of the inevitability of death – but the above inscriptions and portrait

types appear to function in much the same way.

Composition of selfies

Just as the painted self-portrait arose from the invention of the mirror, the typical selfie arose from a

culture where smartphone cameras boasted better image quality than its predecessors and often

included a front-facing camera as well as a back-facing one. The psychological effects of better

images and software also seem to parallel the development of the mirror, from small metallic

mirrors with highly polished surfaces, to glass convex mirrors, and eventually to the undistorted tin-

amalgam flat mirror.66 However, nothing restricts selfie-taking to smartphone cameras. One can still

take a selfie with an ordinary point-and-shoot or DSLR. What does make a selfie stand out from

other self-images is the way the image is composed.

Unlike other photographic self-portraits, a defining feature of the selfie is the presence of the

foreshortened camera-holding arm – here one may draw links with Parmigianino’s self-portrait.67

Typically held at a high angle to achieve a more flattening image, the composition of these selfies

highlight their informality and casual nature.68 It also makes known the limitations of this precise act

of image-making, hindered by the length of one’s own arms: the longer the arm, the larger the field

of view in the pictorial space. Recent technology such as the selfie stick has since attempted to

rectify this issue, ‘extending’ the arm by up to a metre in length.69 Furthermore, they are specifically

tailored for compatibility with various smartphones, providing a lighter alternative to the

professional monopod used for heavier cameras.

Jerry Saltz recently stated that “If both your hands are in the picture and it’s not a mirror shot,

technically, it’s not a selfie – it’s a portrait.”70 This statement makes two distinctions. The first is a

criterion for a self-image to qualify as a direct selfie: the absence of one’s hand(s), specifically the

66 Woods-Marsden, p. 31.

67 Jerry Saltz, ‘Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie’, Vulture, 2014

<http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie.html> [accessed 9 February 2015].

68 ibid.

69 Leo Benedictus, ‘Is This Man Responsible for Inventing the Selfie Stick?’, The Guardian, 11 January 2015

<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2015/jan/11/meet-the-man-who-invented-the-selfie-

stick> [accessed 26 February 2015].

70 Saltz.

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camera-holding one by inference. The second is the acknowledgement of different kinds of selfies.

As the name suggests, the mirror shot is a selfie taken with the aid of a mirror. Typically, these kinds

of selfies allow the photographer to photograph their entire body, popular amongst those after a

work-out session to show off their physique, creating images known as ‘welfies’,71 or, in the case of

Kim Kardashian, to show off her backside.72 Their use of the mirror is akin to its function in Van

Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) as an extension of the pictorial space.73

However, other images that do not follow these conventions have also been referred to as selfies,

such as the ‘hot dog legs’. These depict a section of the individual’s lower half, often symmetrical

and set against an exotic backdrop, often the beach or the swimming pool.

Social context of selfies and why people take them

As the name suggests, most, if not all, selfies focus on the individual. Whilst it is tempting to charge

these people with narcissism,74 I believe there to be much more than this.

The most obvious form of this self-image is the documentary selfie, made with the purpose of

recording a particular event or moment. Here one may draw parallels with the antecedent donor

portraits mentioned previously. Examples range from selfies taken in front of tourist attractions,

selfies taken with friends or pets, up to those involving the photographer next to famous individuals

and celebrities.75 Susan Sontag claimed that all photographs were memento mori:

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability,

mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s

relentless melt.76

71 Carrie Barclay and Malcolm Croft, The Selfie Book: Taking and Making the Best Selfies, Belfies, Photobombs

and More... (London: Prion, 2015), pp. 28-31.

72 Saltz.

73 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. by Katharine H. Jewett (New York and London:

Routledge, 2001), p. 122.

74 Associated Press, ‘What Did Narcissus Say to Instagram? Selfie Time!’, USA Today, 25 June 2013

<http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/06/25/what-did-narcissus-say-to-instagram-selfie-

time/2456261/> [accessed 9 February 2015].

75 ‘Glasgow 2014: Queen “Photo-Bombs” Athletes’ Selfie’, BBC Sport, 24 July 2014

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/commonwealth-games/28464014> [accessed 2 April 2015].

76 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 15.

14

A particular factor underlying the popularity of the selfie appears to be the rise in tourist

photography. Tourist attractions are rarely unaccompanied by travellers holding cameras to their

faces, whether they are photographing Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503-17) or documenting

their morning continental breakfast. Historically, tourism and photography have always come hand

in hand. Some of the earliest travel photographs documented the local area, such as Nicéphore

Niépce’s View from a Window at Le Gras (1826-27) taken with a camera obscura.77 The invention of

smaller, faster, and more portable cameras eased the traveller from having to journey with portable

darkrooms, thus allowing them to photograph more distant areas. There was a desire to capture the

world in the comfort of one’s own home, plastered on bedroom walls or collected in photographic

albums. Taking a photograph was a form of acquisition,78 not dissimilar to the collecting of

reproductive prints and modern-day postcards. This attitude towards photography derives from the

habit of compiling family photograph albums. To borrow the words of Sontag, “Cameras go with

family life.”79 Nowadays, cameras go with daily life. There appears to be a growing need to highlight

the most banal of things and invoke in them some sort of interest, an attitude perhaps driven by a

nostalgia for a less materialistic world. Lynn Schofield Clark suggests that selfies “call into question

the very idea that photography – and even selfies – are supposed to be about capturing something

meaningful and someone special or important.”80

Historically, taking your own image was a pitying and embarrassing act.81 It was a sign that you had

no one to take your photo, further generalising that one was lonesome. Nowadays, this stereotype

has been largely forgotten; it has become the normal thing to do. Several commentators have

attributed this to a rise in self-confidence rather than narcissism.82

Photography and media theorists have often speculated about an image-world and the selfie, or at

least its practice, may allude to this possibility. Tourist photography is often stigmatised for its

77 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day (London: Secker & Warburg,

1982), p. 15.

78 Sontag, pp. 155-6.

79 ibid., p.8.

80 ‘Scholarly Reflections on the “Selfie”’, by Oxford University Press, OUPblog, 2013

<http://blog.oup.com/2013/11/scholarly-reflections-on-the-selfie-woty-2013/> [accessed 5 March 2015].

81 Cep.

82 ibid.

15

substitution of experience for the documentation of said experience.83 In his Society of the Spectacle,

Guy Debord states that:

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense

accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.84

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by

images.85

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real things – dynamic

figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behaviour.86

The image-world is a pseudo-reality where images displace lived experiences. A representation of a

painting becomes a substitute for having seen the work physically. A selfie on a beach becomes an

intimate experience with the represented subject. At some point they become indistinguishable and

potentially come hand-in-hand, which the name ‘tourist photography’ already seems to indicate.

These representations become the focus of communication between people because the members

have seen the shared representation of the experience. We talk about things we see in the media,

which happens to largely consist of images of experiences that happened. For some, this is seen as a

problem and the mass-effect of the selfie phenomenon seems to allude to such a convergence

between image and experience: “[…] the constant mediation of the lens is disrupting experience and

memory.”87 This is further indicated by the rapidity at which these images are viewed:

Instagram images…are low-resolution messages, to be glanced at rather than pored over. As with

much digital culture, the experience is of rapid flow rather than contemplation.88

The majority of selfies are also shared on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and

Instagram. The act of sharing one’s photograph is not a new phenomenon. Family albums were

frequently shown to friends and relatives. However, the difference between these is that taking a

selfie often entails its sharing on social media.89 Many articles have highlighted the individual’s use

83 Sontag, pp. 175-77.

84 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2004), thesis 1.

85 ibid., thesis 4.

86 ibid., thesis 18.

87 Julian Stallabrass, ‘On Selfies’, London Review of Books, 5 June 2014, p. 20.

88 ibid..

89 Lindsay Kite and Lexie Kite, ‘Selfies and Self-Objectification: A Not-So-Pretty Picture’, Beauty Redefined, 2014

<http://www.beautyredefined.net/selfies-and-objectification/> [accessed 19 January 2015].

16

of the selfie as a way to be visible in the world, mimicking celebrity behaviour.90 In other words,

selfie-takers appear to be agents towards a manifestation of their own pseudo-celebrity status,91

some even succeeding the transition to being a real celebrity and living up to Andy Warhol’s recently

challenged famous expression: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”92

There are certainly examples of Instagram-famous individuals, many of whom are typically very

wealthy and display this in their Instagram images. As a result, one’s own material possessions have

become an essential part of identity construction and publicity, not unlike the still life paintings

commissioned centuries earlier.93

In his article for The New York Times, celebrity and avid selfie-taker James Franco highlighted an

alluring quality to the production and sharing of selfies:

In this age of too much information at the click of a button, the power to attract viewers amid the sea

of things to read and watch is power indeed…hell, it’s what everyone wants: attention. Attention is

power.94

From the point of view of a celebrity, the selfie is a way of managing one’s own reputation. The

celebrity selfie is “not only a private portrait of a star, but one also usually composed and taken by

said star – a double whammy.”95 However, his reasoning for the non-celebrity selfie is particularly

reductionist, resorting it to “a chance for subjects to glam it up, to show off a special side of

themselves”.96 On the other hand, something can be gathered from this statement. The fact that a

‘special side’ is shown off means a selection process is made before anything is shared. They will

90 Meghan Murphy, ‘Putting Selfies under a Feminist Lens’, Straight, 2013

<http://www.straight.com/life/368086/putting-selfies-under-feminist-lens> [accessed 29 January 2015].

91 Meghan M. Gallagher, ‘John Berger, Paris Hilton, and The Rich Kids of Instagram: The Social and Economic

Inequality of Image Sharing and Production of Power Through Self-Promotion’, Scripps Senior Theses, 545

(unpublished BA Thesis, Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015)

<http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/545/> [accessed 22 February 2015], p. 19.

92 Adam Sherwin, ‘Andy Warhol’s “Famous for 15 Minutes” Quote May Not Be His, Experts Believe’, The

Independent, 9 April 2014 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/andy-warhols-famous-for-15-

minutes-quote-may-not-be-his-experts-believe-9249200.html> [accessed 5 April 2015].

93 Gallagher, p. 8.

94 James Franco, ‘The Meanings of the Selfie’, The New York Times, 26 December 2013

<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/the-meanings-of-the-selfie.html> [accessed 21 February 2015].

95 ibid.

96 ibid.

17

only share what they feel to be a positive image of themselves: “We worry about our ‘good side’. We

fret about looking fat.”97

The (public) selfie process: a three-step guide

In a joint-study conducted at the Korea National Open University, Seoul, and Ajou University, Suwon,

the researchers noted that the selfie is a self-consumption practice: “The social media creates a

virtual space in which the self is explicitly consumed. Such self-consumption is the act of both

promoting the self and pursuing its authenticity.”98 They make the case for the selfie as a practice for

exploring the authenticity of the image-maker’s self. Whilst this may appear to be an unrealistic

claim, the study identified a number of relevant ideas, theorising that selfie-taking involves three

phases of authenticating acts: embodiment, transference, and use of the self.99

The first phase highlights the dual process of capturing one’s image: visualising and recording. Whilst

the latter holds a documentary function, the former involves a two-fold reflective process “of

discovering self and of self-expression.”100 This reflective process turns the individual from subject to

an object of contemplation: “The self is the agent that reflects and the object that is reflected on.”101

This has been noted by most commentators on the phenomenon, including a proposition of a three-

stage ‘selfie-objectification’ theory, listed below:102

1) Capturing photos of oneself to admire and scrutinise.

2) Ranking and editing those photos to generate an acceptable final image.

3) Sharing those photos online for others to validate.

Ideas about the duality of the self can best be explained with theories about the I/Me states of the

individual: “the I, the self-as-knower, and the Me, the self-as-known.”103

97 Jenny Judge, ‘Rembrandt’s Lessons for the Selfie Era: Why We Must Learn to Look Again’, The Guardian, 16

October 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/16/rembrandt-selfie-era-self-portrait>

[accessed 29 January 2015].

98 Yoo Jin Kwon and Kyoung-Nan Kwon, ‘Consuming the Objectified Self: The Quest for Authentic Self’, Asian

Social Science, 11.2 (2014), 301–12 (pp. 301-2) <http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v11n2p301>.

99 ibid., pp. 304-9.

100 ibid., p. 304.

101 ibid., p. 302.

102 Kite and Kite.

103 Kwon and Kwon, p. 302.

18

The I is the active and subjective aspect; while the me is the empirical and socialized aspect of a

person.104

Due to the socially-dependent nature of the me, it is linked with the value system of the society of

which it is a participant. Therefore, the me evaluates itself as an object on the basis of its learned

interactions within its integrated society. The I can then be seen as acting within the context of the

me:

[…] social networking is about ‘me’ in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group,

as known to and represented by others, rather than the private ‘I’ known best by oneself.105

This first phase of self-authentication enables the individual to put themselves in a position in which

they can see how they appear to others. The selfie embodies the self by becoming a concrete

representation of the individual’s abstract idea of the self.

The second phase involves transferring the individual’s carefully engineered form of self from the

private to the public sphere. The private sphere is typically the cellphone memory or hard-drive

where such images are stored and collected. The documentary function of the selfie is further

emphasised by the fact that the selfie is a tool for communication. Therefore, shared selfies on social

media act as diary entries for an ongoing, prospective timeline of the individual’s activities. These

images then become visual cues and hints for conversation between the individual and prospective

viewers. However, that is not to say that selfies in the private sphere are non-documentary, simply

not decided as a contribution to the public timeline of the individual.

Furthermore, some of the participants believed that posting selfies online was “more appropriate

than direct communication. They did not want to appear to be bragging.”106 There is something to

be noted about this, and it is not the question of whether online, envy-inducing images of luxurious

holidays are classed as bragging or simply online portfolios, for sake of creating a circular argument –

my thoughts lead me to believe they are intended as a subtle bragging technique with the protection

of an Internet barrier. Rather, there appears to be an implicit and varying degree of pride invested in

these images which make it to the public sphere. One could simply say that selfies are posted

because the individual believes they are showing their ‘good side’ or they have just come back from

holiday, maybe even witnessed a spectacular event, and want to talk about it, using the prescribed

104 ibid., p. 302.

105 Sonia Livingstone, ‘Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers’ Use of Social

Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression’, New Media & Society, 10.3 (2008), 393–411 (p.

400) <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444808089415>.

106 Kwon and Kwon, p. 306.

19

method I have mentioned. But what of the 78,776 drunken selfies that occupy Instagram’s

#drunkselfie label at the time of writing? The obvious thought would be that these are exceptional

cases, in that these are people who have been influenced by alcohol and therefore are not in the

right state to judge their actions properly. However, there may be a way around this. Relaxing to an

alcoholic drink is a social custom no stranger than a group of people meeting over coffee and other

non-alcoholic drinks. They occupy weddings, private views and after-work activities. If one were to

draw some kind of conclusion, it would be that drunken selfies are posted for the sake of celebration

and would add to their reputation as a social creature.

The third and final phase addresses the individual’s use of their selfie in the public sphere. The

consumption of the selfie is an act with the aim of eliciting social interaction: “Without other

people’s reactions to the selfies, consumption of the selfies is not complete.”107 Greater interaction

usually indicates the individual has become a person of interest – attention is power. Another

indicator would be the amount of followers one garners on their social media accounts, suggesting

that people want more. The iterative process restarts itself.

A form of operant conditioning is also at play here. Good responses will reinforce and increase the

individual’s behaviour, in this case by their selection of ‘good’ interesting images; bad responses will

decrease the particular behaviour that led to the undesirable response. Franco makes these

processes known to us:

[…] I’ve learned that the selfie is one of the most popular ways to post – and garner the most likes

from followers…I can see which posts don’t get attention or make me lose followers […]108

Within this process, the Korean study identified three valued identity benefits, each addressing the

individual’s self-relevant goals: feeling connected, feeling in control, and feeling virtuous.109

Social connection could be seen as the individual’s primary goal. This is certainly easiest with selfies

taken with friends; they are more likely to be received by said friends and garner responses. With

individual selfies, the same goal is achieved by posting more ‘interesting’ or ‘flattering’ content. The

individual may also respond to images shared by others, usually positively tailored in the hopes of

receiving similar treatment. Unlike other forms of shared content, such as email, the capacity for

instant-messaging interactions solicited by the selfie allows it to imitate real-time group

107 ibid., p. 306.

108 Franco.

109 Kwon and Kwon, pp. 306-9.

20

conversation, adding to a feeling of intimacy.110 These reciprocal interactions create a sense of

belonging in a virtual communicative space, if not in the full sense of the word ‘community’.111 This

communicative space may or may not transcend into face-to-face interactions. A final point to note

is that these interactions are, for the most part, voluntary; there is no obligation to respond at all.

The second identity benefit is the feeling of being in control. This is, in fact, paradoxical. These

feelings are aroused because the individual believes they control the entire process, from the

moment of taking the selfie up to the frequency of replying to commentators of the shared image.

This derives from the illusion that one can control external reactions by carefully engineering one’s

image: “In selfies we can be famous and in control of our own images and storylines.”112 Like the

celebrity selfie, the individual behaves like a brand, with the selfie acting as brand advertising.113

These images are thus mediated and constructed forms of the individual’s sense of self – you are

what you post.

This feeling is very strongly illustrated with celebrity selfies:

It has value regardless of the photo’s quality, because it is ostensibly an intimate shot of someone

whom the public is curious about. It is the prize shot that the paparazzi would kill for, because they

would make good money; it is the shot that magazines and blogs want, because it will get the readers

close to the subject.114

Celebrity selfies are examples of images that give an illusion that they are ‘just like us’, when in fact

they are carefully constructed to appear that way. Commentators to these images will then likely

develop a sense of intimacy and familiarity, a parasocial relationship where we develop a one-sided

‘friendship’ with a constructed public persona.115 We are deluded into thinking we know the

celebrity’s inner life and we are reinforced by this feeling of familiarity. On the other hand, the

celebrity knows nothing about us or even our existence. With this relationship, celebrities are able to

convince their followers that whatever they post is truthful and honest, and not simply a publicity

stunt.

110 David Crystal, Language and the Internet, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 14-

15.

111 ibid., p. 62.

112 Associated Press.

113 ‘Scholarly Reflections on the “Selfie”’.

114 Franco.

115 Gallagher, p. 24.

21

The paradox lies in the fact that these selfies have entered the public sphere. As Sonia Livingstone’s

study on teenagers’ uses of social networking sites (SNSs) suggests, “[…] teenagers must and do

disclose personal information in order to sustain intimacy, but they wish to be in control of how they

manage this disclosure.”116 Whilst the selfie is not only a teenage practice, and neither are SNSs, as

evidenced by Barack Obama’s selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral with the British and Danish Prime

Ministers,117 the logistics of the process are applicable across all users of SNSs. Livingstone pointed

out that the privacy settings of SNSs, in particular MySpace and Twitter, are not varied enough; the

classification of contacts (friends versus all users) is simply not enough for the user to control their

distribution of material. The difficulty increases with the more ‘friends’ one has. Instagram and

Twitter are no better with their system of ‘followers’; one can either allow their content to be

viewed by all or via a permit system that needs to be agreed by the account owner. A far more

serious problem is the unpredictable use of the shared content by the viewable audience. Cases of

‘leaked’ images attest to this fact.

The final identity benefit is the feeling of being virtuous of one’s actions.118 In the case of the selfie,

the individual will only find their content virtuous if they believe it displays a genuine side of them,

that it does them justice. They are portrayed as more attractive, but not to the extent that it could

be seen as false-enhancement, rather simply realistic enhancement. Obviously this does not apply to

all selfies since there are a considerable number of unedited photographs on the Internet, but many

mobile applications are constantly advertising pre-set filters for the convenience of their users.

Creating a flattering image is therefore only a single click away. The selfie process ends with a moral

sense of honesty. It would appear that the editing process is an important part within the discovery

of the authentic self, potentially a parallel to Rembrandt’s use of personas.

116 Livingstone, p. 405.

117 Allison Pearson, ‘Mandela Memorial Selfie: If President Obama Acts like This, Don’t Blame Teenagers’, The

Telegraph, 11 December 2013 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-

mandela/10511140/Mandela-memorial-selfie-If-President-Obama-acts-like-this-dont-blame-teenagers.html>

[accessed 5 April 2015].

118 Kwon and Kwon, pp. 308-9.

22

Differences between selfies and self-portraits

Many articles over the Internet have made attempts to compare these two rather similar forms of

representing the self. It is not surprising that many parallels can be made between them, principally

the individual’s status in society as a visible and meaningful figure. Noah Berlatsky sees the two as

being the same:

The selfie is a deliberate, aesthetic expression—it's a self-portrait, which is an artistic genre with an

extremely long pedigree. There can be bad self-portraits and good self-portraits, but the self-portrait

isn't bad or good in itself. Like any art, it depends on what you do with it.119

However, there are definitely distinct features that separate the selfie from the self-portrait. To

borrow the words of Alli Burness:

[Selfies] are shared as part of a conversation, a series of contextual interactions and are connected to

the selfie-maker in an intimate, embodied and felt way. We are allowed to leave these elements out

of our reading of artist’s self-portraits.120

Self-portraits do not have this reciprocity of interactions, regardless of whether they are drawings,

paintings, or photographs. Though Dürer’s drawings became a means of conversing, such as his self-

portrait where the naked artist points to a circled area of his stomach for his doctor’s consultation,121

this is an exceptional case which still does not match the frequency of interactions elicited by the

selfie.

Marshall McLuhan once made a distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media in Understanding

Media.122 A hot medium extended a single sense in “high definition”, whereby high definition means

“the state of being well filled with data.”123 Because so little is needed to be filled in by the viewer, a

hot medium is typically low in participation. On the other hand, a cool medium of low definition

requires higher participation because more needs to be filled in by the viewer. By this definition, the

119 Noah Berlatsky, ‘Selfies Are Art’, The Atlantic, 2013

<http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/selfies-are-art/281772/> [accessed 9 February

2015].

120 Alli Burness, ‘What’s the Difference between a Selfie and a Self-Portrait?’, Museum In A Bottle, 2015

<http://museuminabottle.com/2015/01/22/whats-the-difference-between-a-selfie-and-a-self-portrait/>

[accessed 10 February 2015].

121 Christopher White, Dürer: The Artist and His Drawings (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1971), pp. 17-18.

122 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge, 2001),

pp. 24-25.

123 ibid., p. 24.

23

selfie appears to be a low definition, cool medium. The still image provides a little more than an

image of the individual’s body, face or features at most, thus rendering it low definition. High

participation is accommodated by the social interactions that come from the image being shared to

an audience, therefore making it a cool medium. The self-portrait may therefore be viewed as a high

definition, hot medium, but I think this varies across different art forms and media; paintings could

be said to have high definition in their technical and material skill, whereas a photograph doesn’t

necessarily have the same equivalent as a material quality like impasto.

Another major difference is the temporality of the selfie.124 Multiple selfies are usually taken in a

single sitting and if the results are unsatisfactory they can be easily deleted and replaced with new

images. Then the best one is selected for sharing on social media. There have been no such cases in

the history of self-portraiture. Self-portraits were largely made for posterity but, unlike the selfie

which relies on an iterative process to manage a reputation, a single self-portrait was made to last

and not intended to be replaced by a successive image.

Concluding remarks

As my analysis has shown, the selfie cannot be judged without its context, a system of social

interactions built up at an increasing rate. The act of taking a selfie is largely documentary, but when

it enters the public realm by the individual’s choice, deeper self-reflective motives are at play. These

involve self-objectification for the sake of being able to view oneself as others would view them. A

carefully-constructed idea of the self is then emulated in the shared selfie. Once shared, the

individual feeds on the number of positive and negative responses which determine their future

actions within the iterative process. The primary goal of this process is to feel connected by eliciting

conversation with other members of the virtual community.

The motivational concerns underlying the production of selfies and self-portraits are largely

indistinguishable. They both present the individual’s awareness as a member of society. They are

conscious of their reputation and how other people perceive them. The respective media are used

as a means of controlling these perceptions, presenting personas and authentic selves in the hope of

garnering good responses. Some are less concerned with these ideas, resorting selfie-taking and self-

portraiture to a documentary function.

124 Annelisa Stephan, ‘What’s the Difference between a Selfie and a Self-Portrait?’, The Getty Iris, 2015

<https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/whats-the-difference-between-a-selfie-and-a-self-portrait/> [accessed 10

February 2015].

24

Looking further, due to this iterative process being essentially conditioned and moulded by the social

climate of the individual’s community, it could be a possibility that the selfie phenomenon is in fact a

relativistic art form. Social norms are continually being altered, and so will attitudes towards the

selfie.125 The selfie as a practice, possibly an art form, will likely adapt itself relative to these changes.

Perhaps the selfie really will mark the beginnings of an image-world where the world and its

interactions will be mediated by images.

125 Jonathan Jones, ‘RIP the Selfie: When Prince Harry Calls Time on a Craze, You Know It’s Well and Truly

Dead’, The Guardian, 7 April 2015

<http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/apr/07/selfie-prince-harry-died-in-

2015-selfie-stick?CMP=fb_gu> [accessed 9 April 2015].

25

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