Selfie madness

The New York Times has an op-ed about selfies (through the ages). I've taken a bunch of them myself. Here's a Flickr album of my selfies.

If you click on that image you'll be whisked away to my Flicker album where you can scroll through the images. But if you position your cursor above the image you'll see little arrows appear (first at the) right and left. Click those to scroll back and forth through the set. Here's a link to my various posts about selfies. I've got a couple of posts where I comment on selfies. That post also contains two photos of Rembrant selfies, with a comment or three; he was famous for painting.

The Times op-ed, by Marisa Mazria Katz and Nato Thompson notes this about a self portrait by Jan van Eyck, from 1433:

This painting is sometimes credited as the first surviving self-portrait, though, as its title indicates, that designation is uncertain. There are clues that the subject is the artist himself — he stares deep into the eyes of the viewer (an unusual pose for the era), and van Eyck carved a Flemish saying into the gilded frame, “As I can,” in Greek characters. At the time, most paintings depicted either religious subjects or wealthy patrons. Van Eyck’s virtuosity brought him wealth and fame, and perhaps, via his self-portrait, a way of announcing a new kind of elite.

Later:

By 1888, George Eastman had developed the first roll-film Kodak camera, vastly simplifying the photographic process. The advances in photographic equipment allowed Joseph Byron, from a Manhattan photo studio, to take a proper selfie — arms outstretched, head cocked, eyes staring into the viewer’s.

Just yesterday:

Part of the first generation of artists to deploy social media, Ai Weiwei wrote in his inaugural blog entry in 2005: "To express yourself needs a reason; expressing yourself is the reason."

Mr. Ai took this selfie in an elevator as Chinese police officers were arresting him to prevent him from testifying on behalf of an activist documenting the devastation of the Sichuan earthquake. He uploaded it to social media to announce his location and precarious situation but also as an act of protest — foreshadowing the increasingly important role selfies would play in social movements to come.

And then we a bunch of selfies and self-portraits by women, where Katz and Thompson note: "Women today take far more selfies than men do, perhaps as an active way of molding their own images." I'll leave you with this:

The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known for, among many things, creating installations that have become irresistible backdrops for museumgoers taking a selfie.

First constructed in the 1960s, her “Infinity Mirror Rooms” enthrall with their constellations of softly glowing lights, allowing viewers to see themselves reflected and refracted on mirrored walls, offering the possibility of a completely immersive self-portrait.

It's a fascinating article. Check it out.

Don't mind me

No AIs here, but there is a birdbrain

Are you sure about that?

Some this and that, a mini cosmos

More selfies, more thoughts

Click on photo to embiggen.

Here’s some more selfies.

Though artists have been doing self-portraits for centuries, and people have been using cameras to take pictures of themselves for, I don’t know how long, but I’d guess back into the 19th century, I believe that the term “selfie” is from the smart phone era, though I don’t know that. I assume most selfies are taken to memorialize something, a trip to the State of Liberty, the Great Pyramid, sharing a pizza with a friend, of maybe a quiet moment with your pet cat. Here and there someone is treating the selfie as a medium of self-expression and deliberately experimenting with it. But I’d think that’s relatively rare.

Anyhow, I’m treating it as a medium of self-expression. I used my point-and-shoot camera, a Panasonic DMC-ZS7, to take my earlier selfies. I’ve used my Pentax K-7 to take the photos below. It’s a Pentax D-7, which is a DSLR. It’s considerably heavier than the Panasonic and so shaped that it’s almost impossible to hold it in my right hand when taking the photo. The process is thus more awkward.

Since I can’t see myself while taking the shot I cannot compose it. I just click the shutter and hope for something usable. That is to say, between cropping and adjusting the image in various ways, can I make something of it? That’s an interesting process and is one of the reasons I’m doing this.

Here's six recent shots. I’ve numbered them for reference.

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

My first observation is that I can’t, or anyhow I don’t, treat the background as a neutral backdrop whose main purpose is to disappear and thus to present the subject, my face in this case. The relationship between the face and the background is more active. Though my dominates all of these images except TWO, it doesn’t complete efface the background. The second image is rather different. Most of my body is reflected in the mirror, making my face a rather small part of the image. In a sense, it’s the mirror that’s the foreground subject, but only in a sense. The image is still an image of me, me taking a photo.

Now look at these two self-portraits by Rembrandt, who painted many of them throughout his career.

Rembrandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Two Circles

In the first upper one Rembrandt is just left of center and the background is neutral, but so dark that it blends with the image. In the lower one Rembrandt is more visibly to the left of center and the background is a bit lighter. Notice the two circles in the background. The composition would be a bit off kilter without them. The right-hand circle balances the portrait while the mostly-covered left-hand circle answers it.

What was he thinking while doing this? You take a photograph in an instant. Not so with painting a portrait. You must position yourself in front of a mirror and look back and forth between the image you see in the mirror and the image materializing on the canvas. How do you control your facial expression? How do you keep it constant from beginning to end? Or do you? What are you thinking?

As for me, yes, I do think about my facial expression as I take the selfie. But I also must think about just where the camera is, where it’s pointing, snapping the shutter, all of which are more difficult with the heavier and more awkward K-7. Thus it is a bit difficult for me to worry too much about what my face it up to.

There’s a sense is which the exercise is alienating, but I don’t like the negative connotations of the word. Bertolt Brecht’s word, Verfremdungseffekt, is better. It translates as “distance effect.” “Distance” is much better. Distancing, I’m distant from myself. My face becomes the face, visual material in the image, just like the background.

I took the first picture in my work area, the second in a bathroom. I was standing on the landing of a stairwell for the third, with a window behind me. Now, FOUR, I’m walking down a hall, snapping pictures as I can, giving hardly a thought to my facial expression since moving the camera around and snapping the shots consumes my attention. I like the lights, and the tilt. In FIVE I’ve turned a corner and have positioned myself in front of a window, different from the one in THREE. What I like about this one is the way the light washes out the walls of the building we see through the window so that all we can see are windows. In SIX, same stretch of hall, different window. Now we see the building behind me through that window.

More later.

Deeper and deeper [seeds of recursion]

Selfies and beyond...∞

This isn’t by first excursion into selfie territory. I went back there in September of 2019 and continued into the early pandemic days in the summer of 2020, playing around considerably. I’ve decided to return.

What put the idea into my head was a line from “Kubla Khan”: “His flashing eyes, his floating hair.” I figured I had the floating hair down – I haven’t cut it since the beginning of the pandemic – but the flashing eyes might take a bit of work. That’s a problem when taking a selfie – What do you do with your face? Since you’re taking the photo by holding the camera at arm’s length and pointing it at your face, you can’t actually see your subject. I mean, you’re holding your arm out, grasping your camera a bit awkwardly, and thinking, “I’m taking a selfie, now what?” You see the problem, no?

Anyhow, here’s the eighth photo in my recent series:

I think of it as a stunt shot, photographing yourself in a mirror. So what? And yet, somehow, I like this photo. It manages to creep out of the stunt category. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s that bicycle peeking out at the right, or the bit of pipe at the upper left. It’s a bit messy. I like that.

And then there’s the camera’s flash. Though I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, that’s our flashing eyes, or one of them at least. You can’t see much of my floating hair, but it’s in full view in the next two photos:

I particularly like the second photo. From a standard POV the light’s lousy. We’ve got light coming in through the window while the left side of my face (on the right in the photo) is in shadow. But I really like the light, the way the scene through the window washes out at the top, the play of light on the ceiling and along the walls, the bit of light from the sconce in the hall at the right. Photographs are made with light, so why not show it? I have no problem with photos that aren’t trying to pretend that they’re not photos, not artifacts crafted out of light.

I still have to figure out what to do with my face. But there’s not much I can do about my jowls except loose some weight. Ah...

We’re back to the mirror:

I like this one a lot. I’m holding the camera off the to the side and pointing it at my face in the mirror. You can’t see the camera...why I did it. But I like the interplay between the room reflected in the mirror and the wall around the mirror itself. The wall tiles in the reflection are in fact the same color as those around the mirror. That’s not how the light plays in the photo. Notice, again, how the image washes out at the right.

And then I had an idea:

I’m going to play around with THAT some more. That’s one hell of a rabbit hole. Lots of nonsense down there, lots of stunt photos. But maybe I can make something out of it.

For the first time I’m thinking that maybe I need a small studio set-up so I can control the right and get things aligned just so. That’s not going to happen for a while. But I can still play around.

More later.

Virtual Reality

Who is that masked man? [Covid-19]

Am I blue? Not when I'm orange!

When I leaned that today's theme was going to be "selfie" I thought, WTF! I don't do selfies. And I don't. But since I decided to join this bit of fun I figured I should play along.

September 28

Today's picture theme is "selfie". Retweet or reply with your own "selfie" picture!

(Tomorrow's picture theme will be "shoes".)#Photography #Photo #PhotoOfTheDay #PhotoArt #AmateurPhotography#PhonePhotography #Airplane #FirstClass #Selfie pic.twitter.com/eApmvneGKs

— Daily Picture Theme (@DailyPicTheme) September 28, 2019

And so I did.

Now, there are two reasons I don't do selfies. The first reason is general principle. The second reason is that I can't, not really. That is, these days selfies are executed with smart phones. And while I've got a smart phone, I've got bare bones service, no data plan. Which means that, while I can take photos, and thus do selfies, there's no way to get them out of the phone, hence no way to use them in this game.

What to do?

Old school, that's what. 

People were doing selfies long before smart phones, My fiend Al did them all the time. So I got out my trusty DMC-ZS7 and snapped away. Since I'm shooting myself I can't really see what I'm doing. So there's no point in fiddling with composition. Just shoot blind. And since this is an exercise, why not engage the old Verfremdungseffekt with a little orange and blue? And that's what I did.

That's a bit intense, no?

Ahhhh....