If self portrait is an art form, then so is a selfie !
For long I have been trying to master the art of taking a selfie and I realised how tough it is to take that perfect selfie ! The light, the focus, the perspective, all led me to research some more into the art of taking a selfie and I realised it is worthy of its own ART form ! That’s when I stumbled upon the a portrait discussion in a blog which said ,“The selfie has taken self-representation even further and made it even easier, making portraits just might seem like the celebration of a dying art. In our digital age, portraiture might seem to be less and less relevant when you can just snap a picture of someone with a camera. Or, of yourself.?” Well, does seem relevant somewhat !
In my construct that selfie is a potrait art form , I would like to begin with the definition of a portrait according to the 18th century art theorist Roger de Piles, is that a portrait is an attempt to render that real individual so exactly, that the image encapsulates not only the physical traits of their body, but also the emotional traits of their soul and the surroundings. A portrait, in other words, is one person’s attempt to capture another person completely. Some might argue that there is a difference between painting and photography, but the discussion is rather about what a portrait actually is and how it differs from other images. The first thing that distinguishes portraits is fairly obvious: they are images of real individuals, not generic figures or inanimate objects. Hence , going by this definition, a selfie is a portrait that captures the person in all it entirety, physical, emotional and surroundings et all!
The second important trait of a portrait is the fact that it is essentially an encounter. When looking at a portrait – meeting the sitter’s gaze or surveying their body – we often feel a sense of intimacy or connection, because what we’re experiencing is someone else’s engagement with that person. We’re looking at a trace of their interaction – at how one person sees another person.
Now that is true for the selfie too , but the only thing difference is that you get to watch yourself , not the portrait maker! You see yourself , more like a self portrait and you decide the look you want, the moment you want to capture.
No matter the style – expressive, realistic, or abstracted – a selfie-portrait, as I like to call it is a dialogue between artist and the camera, and the image on the screen (instead of the canvas) is a witnessing of the varying degrees of intimacy in these human conversations.
Before selfies made the act of self-representation available to anyone with a smartphone, self-portraiture had been the preserve of artists alone. But while this sub-category of portraiture has a long history in art, the word itself is not nearly so old. According to the OED, “self-portrait” did not appear in the English language until 1831 – and in France, auto-portrait did not make it into the Dictionnaire Française until the year 1928.
When Sir Joshua Reynolds painted himself in his Royal Academy robes in 1780, or when Gustave Courbet painted his dramatically self-reflexive The Desperate Man in the 1840s, neither artist was painting a “self-portrait” (or “auto portrait”), per se.
Adolph Menzel, The Artist’s Foot …
But even before the term was coined, self-portraits were always different from portraits, just as selfies are different from other photos. If a portrait is a social encounter with another person, then a self-portrait is a perceptual encounter with one’s own body – and all the physical constraints that such an act involves. The physiological impossibility of seeing oneself has fascinated artists for centuries, inspiring ingenious works that play with these constraints (like Brett Whiteley’s mirrored reflection seeing himself seeing) or escape them entirely (like the German artist Adolph Menzel’s painting the Artist’s foot, where he attempts a true phenomenological experience of his own body through the painting of his foot).
Even with the aid of a smartphone, these same physical constraints give the selfie that distinctive look, with its tell-tale signs of production – a head shot, often to the side of the foreground, sometimes with a bit of outstretched arm. But this is also exactly why the selfie has taken off. It has provided everyone with the opportunity to experiment with those physical constraints of self-seeing and self-representation, giving rise to the plethora of sub-sub-categories (belfies, welfies, shelfies, etc) that are all attempts to do with a camera what artists like Whiteley and Menzel did in a painting.
As digital technologies provide new scope for experimenting with acts of portrayal, selfie-ists have much to learn from painters of the past and present. But selfie too is in itself a growing art form if done properly !
I just loved Jayson Musson’s (a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman) work where he exposed the ridiculous process of taking a selfie in public by creating a video in which he struggles to shoot one while muttering about how he can't get it right.
According to the book "Sizing Up The Selfie Revolution," the concept of the #selfie first appeared in 2004 on Flickr but took almost 10 years to crack the mainstream consciousness. Today, Twitter and Instagram are the selfie's main brewing petri dish. From celebrities to world leaders and actors to activists all using this digital art form to capture moments, memories and life in general!
As Kate Losse recently argued in the New Yorker, selfies in the pre-social media mid-2000s belonged to a "largely private genre." She writes: "From 2006 to 2009, the term 'MySpace pic' described an amateurish, flash-blinded self-portrait, often taken in front of a bathroom mirror. Self-portraits shot with cell phones, or 'selfies' — cheap-looking, evoking the MySpace era — became a sign of bad taste."All that changed with the socialization of the web and advanced technologies of mobile devices.
"I think the selfie has to be considered art, accepting that not all art is great and some is very bad," Hugh Dornbush, founder of selfie.com, an anticipated start-up, told Newsweek. "But it's a deliberate act of self-expression. So far it's been easy to equate that self-expression with narcissism (which it often is), but the selfie is fundamentally a self-portrait using modern technology. And of course that is art."
Self portrait by Vincent Van Gogh
For long I have been trying to master the art of taking a selfie and I realised how tough it is to take that perfect selfie ! The light, the focus, the perspective, all led me to research some more into the art of taking a selfie and I realised it is worthy of its own ART form ! That’s when I stumbled upon the a portrait discussion in a blog which said ,“The selfie has taken self-representation even further and made it even easier, making portraits just might seem like the celebration of a dying art. In our digital age, portraiture might seem to be less and less relevant when you can just snap a picture of someone with a camera. Or, of yourself.?” Well, does seem relevant somewhat !
In my construct that selfie is a potrait art form , I would like to begin with the definition of a portrait according to the 18th century art theorist Roger de Piles, is that a portrait is an attempt to render that real individual so exactly, that the image encapsulates not only the physical traits of their body, but also the emotional traits of their soul and the surroundings. A portrait, in other words, is one person’s attempt to capture another person completely. Some might argue that there is a difference between painting and photography, but the discussion is rather about what a portrait actually is and how it differs from other images. The first thing that distinguishes portraits is fairly obvious: they are images of real individuals, not generic figures or inanimate objects. Hence , going by this definition, a selfie is a portrait that captures the person in all it entirety, physical, emotional and surroundings et all!
The second important trait of a portrait is the fact that it is essentially an encounter. When looking at a portrait – meeting the sitter’s gaze or surveying their body – we often feel a sense of intimacy or connection, because what we’re experiencing is someone else’s engagement with that person. We’re looking at a trace of their interaction – at how one person sees another person.
Now that is true for the selfie too , but the only thing difference is that you get to watch yourself , not the portrait maker! You see yourself , more like a self portrait and you decide the look you want, the moment you want to capture.
No matter the style – expressive, realistic, or abstracted – a selfie-portrait, as I like to call it is a dialogue between artist and the camera, and the image on the screen (instead of the canvas) is a witnessing of the varying degrees of intimacy in these human conversations.
The rise of the selfie…..
What has been fascinating about the rise of the selfie is that its become a vague cultural practice and hence begs to become a category of representation in itself in the art world. Something that teenagers were doing on social media became something that US presidents and British prime ministers did at meetings with heads of state (even when those meetings took place at funerals (sic)).Before selfies made the act of self-representation available to anyone with a smartphone, self-portraiture had been the preserve of artists alone. But while this sub-category of portraiture has a long history in art, the word itself is not nearly so old. According to the OED, “self-portrait” did not appear in the English language until 1831 – and in France, auto-portrait did not make it into the Dictionnaire Française until the year 1928.
When Sir Joshua Reynolds painted himself in his Royal Academy robes in 1780, or when Gustave Courbet painted his dramatically self-reflexive The Desperate Man in the 1840s, neither artist was painting a “self-portrait” (or “auto portrait”), per se.
Adolph Menzel, The Artist’s Foot …
But even before the term was coined, self-portraits were always different from portraits, just as selfies are different from other photos. If a portrait is a social encounter with another person, then a self-portrait is a perceptual encounter with one’s own body – and all the physical constraints that such an act involves. The physiological impossibility of seeing oneself has fascinated artists for centuries, inspiring ingenious works that play with these constraints (like Brett Whiteley’s mirrored reflection seeing himself seeing) or escape them entirely (like the German artist Adolph Menzel’s painting the Artist’s foot, where he attempts a true phenomenological experience of his own body through the painting of his foot).
Stock image of a woman taking a selfie
As digital technologies provide new scope for experimenting with acts of portrayal, selfie-ists have much to learn from painters of the past and present. But selfie too is in itself a growing art form if done properly !
I just loved Jayson Musson’s (a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman) work where he exposed the ridiculous process of taking a selfie in public by creating a video in which he struggles to shoot one while muttering about how he can't get it right.
According to the book "Sizing Up The Selfie Revolution," the concept of the #selfie first appeared in 2004 on Flickr but took almost 10 years to crack the mainstream consciousness. Today, Twitter and Instagram are the selfie's main brewing petri dish. From celebrities to world leaders and actors to activists all using this digital art form to capture moments, memories and life in general!
As Kate Losse recently argued in the New Yorker, selfies in the pre-social media mid-2000s belonged to a "largely private genre." She writes: "From 2006 to 2009, the term 'MySpace pic' described an amateurish, flash-blinded self-portrait, often taken in front of a bathroom mirror. Self-portraits shot with cell phones, or 'selfies' — cheap-looking, evoking the MySpace era — became a sign of bad taste."All that changed with the socialization of the web and advanced technologies of mobile devices.
"I think the selfie has to be considered art, accepting that not all art is great and some is very bad," Hugh Dornbush, founder of selfie.com, an anticipated start-up, told Newsweek. "But it's a deliberate act of self-expression. So far it's been easy to equate that self-expression with narcissism (which it often is), but the selfie is fundamentally a self-portrait using modern technology. And of course that is art."
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