Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: A selfie, whatever else it might be, is usually a photograph: a pictorial image produced by a camera.This banal observation informs widespread understandings of the selfie as a cultural category: "A photograph that one has taken of oneself" (Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year, 2013, p. 1).Yet despite the selfie's obvious photographic provenance, little scholarly research has drawn systematically on the intellectual resource most closely associated with the aesthetics of its host medium: photography theory.In a way, this is unsurprising.The selfie is the progeny of digital networks.Its distinctiveness from older forms of self-depiction seems to derive from nonrepresentational changes: innovations in distribution, storage, and metadata that are not directly concerned with the production or aesthetic design of images.As the 2013 Oxford Dictionaries definition continues, the selfie is typically "taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website."It is these innovations that are thought to distinguish the selfie: Instantaneous distribution of an image via Instagram and similar social networks is what makes the phenomenon of the selfie significantly different from its earlier photographic precursors.(Tifentale, 2014, p. 11) Recent research on transformations in personal photography, in general, has been largely provoked by these nonrepresentational developments (Lasén & Gómez Cruz, 2009;Lister, 2013;Nightingale, 2007): Their influence has even prompted Gómez Cruz and Meyer (2012) to proclaim the arrival of a new "fifth moment" in photography history.And where aesthetic developments are foregrounded, they too appear to be driven by device functions not principally concerned with image production or design.Hence the immediacy, ephemerality, and incessant performativity of contemporary everyday photographs are primarily explained with reference to the combined ubiquity, mobility, and connectivity of smartphone devices (Murray, 2008;Van Dijck, 2008;Van House, 2011).Once nonrepresentational technological changes are made analytically preeminent, what role remains for an aesthetically oriented and medium-specific intellectual tradition like photography theory?In
Author: Paul Frosh
Institution: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1853200623