how to see yourself
What is a selfie?
the Oxford Dictionary defines selfie as  a photograph that one has taken of oneself
typically taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media site
The selfie is a striking exemple of how once elite pursuits have become a global visual culture
At one time, self-portraits were the preserve of a highly skilled few
Now anyone with a camera phone can make one.
The selfie expresses, develops, expands and intensifies the long history of the self-portrait
The Ladies-in-Waiting by Velazquez
During the modernity, being portrayed was a privilege of a few people.
Vélazquez stands to our left hand side. The canvas he is working on blocks our view.
The painting revolves around the
self-portrait of the artist
we see the Maids of the title, the curtseying women, who are the attendants of the girl in white.
everyone in the painting is looking at someone,
who is located at the viewer's vantage
Back into the painting, we see two figures in a mirror reflecting the people everyone is looking at.
They are the King and Queen, which is why everyone seems frozen to the spot
But the King and Queen are in the actual place of the painter
The self portrait of the artist claimed that art was the work of nobility not artisans.
Velázquez claims the power of Majesty for art by association and by depiction.
The painter is capable of accomplishments others are not.
the power of representation
The portrait and the hero
In the Age of Revolution,
when the old monarchies collapsed,
a new frenzy of the visible accompanied the social changes.
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were new illustrated newspapers
and magazines being published, visiting-card photographs, revolutionizing the visible.
The self-portrait of the romantic hero became the picture of a hero.
Young revolutionaries and artists seem to 
 prefer death over dishonor.
Bayard, who also invented a photographic 
 process at this time
might be credit with inventing the selfie on his "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man"
He also invented the photographic fake because he was not actually dead
His photograph is an event. It presupposes that the community watching it
can imagine the heroic narrative of the author's suicide
The painter Gustave Coubert appropriated  the idea of the artist's suicide for his own self-portrait
Toulouse-Lautrec deliberately used his reflection in a mirror to make a self portrait.
Lautrec does not distort the reality of his difference, his short stature. It´s a different kind of heroism
Whereas for dominant groups the mirror is often a site of affirmation,
for people who look or feel different, the mirror can be a site of trauma
Lautrec's self-portrait confronts that sight without making himself the object of a freak show.
Postmodern condition
When the First World War had devastated Europe, the modern period, defined by its heroic artists, seemed to be over
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp developed his idea
to create a new readymade self-portrait
Using a hinger mirror, the photo booth  created a five-way portrait in three copies.
Duchamp did not see himself as one but as many selves
Whereas the heroic modern artist simply depicted their own image,
the post-modern artist make themselves as their primary project.
Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp's alter ego
The implication of the Selavy's portrait is that gender is a performance.
She seems feminine because of her clothes, makeup and jewelry, as well as the way she holds her body
Simone de Beauvoir put it pithily:
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
The post-modern self-portrait is a performance
In a series of self-portraits, CIndy Sherman set out to counter
the construction of women as passive objects of male desire
She began her project just after Laura Mulvey had coined the expression "the male gaze"
Men look at the action through the eyes of the male hero
and women are obliged to do the same, a compulsory gender manipulation
Photographic self-portrait can also be a diary and a record of what has happened.
In the classic definition of scholar Richard Scherchner, performance is "twice-performed behavior"
All forms of human activity are a performance
A performance might be an artwork, or it might be a chef cooking a dish
Or then again it might be anyone whatever giving a performance
on their gender, race and sexuality in everyday life.
Samuel Fosso, a young african photographer, has visualized how his body is "Africanized" and "racialized"
Fosso set out to undo the white gaze by making fun of it in his self-portraits.
The leopard skin that we see in Fosso's photograph is another african visual cliché
reinforced by by former dictator of Zaire Mobuto Soko, tolerated by the United States because his anti-communist stants
Fosso has described this self-portrait as:
"I am an African chief who have sold the continent to the white men"
Fosso allude to the fact that the tribal system, dominated by chiefs,
was a creation of colonial powers, rather than being traditionally African
Today, the building blocks of human identity, what we call gender, sex, race and class, have changed
and can be glimpsed in the selfie.
When ordinary people pose themselves in the most flattering  way they can,
they take over the role of artist as a hero
Despite the name, the selfie is really about social groups and communications within those groups
Selfies are not narcissism.
Narcissus spent his life looking at himself but he did not release a copy of his image for others to look at
It is the development of a new visual conversation medium
