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.
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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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