An Echo Of Selfies
Monday, September 01, 2014
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| Echo & Narcissus - John William Waterhouse |
In not most of my
birthdays and in a not so distant past I have sometimes taken my portrait. Today
August 31 (I am writing this today) I decided to take my picture to prove a
point.
My point in short (but
I will elaborate) is that a contemporary selfie means nothing. It has to be
compared with what came so we can imagine what will come.
I have faced some women
I liked at cafés when I was a younger man and as I was
listening to them talk sometimes a curious event would happen. Their voice
would become an intelligible drone and suddenly the woman would age before my
eyes. The aging in some cases was pleasant, in others they became bitter and
old. I
have never known if any of those women might have had the talent in my
direction. If they did would they have seen what I saw today in my Fuji FP-3000B Instant b+w
snap shot?
Compared with the snap
(it was Polaroid Instant b+w negative film) I took on August 31, 1987 there is
lots of light that has diminished in my eyes in the current exposure. There was
an awareness about whom I thought I was in that former snap while in today’s
there is more of a resignation of balancing the successes with the defaults and
failures.
I cannot understand
this trend of the selfie. Already in my past when I photographed celebrities
the accompanying writer would invariably ask to pose by them for some sort of
posterity. At the very least these pictures were taken with portrait lenses and
good lighting. Now selfies distort faces with the wide-angle effect built
into the smart phones. Since those using them cannot correct the distortion
they now accept it as a cool alternative.
In social media I see little
posting of stuff designed, created, built, written, or taken by those posting
except for those selfies. At the very least we (I) must acknowledge and praise
that they are original (created) content and not borrowed. Shared, more often
than not, is sharing the borrowed and rarely the created.
Selfies are original,
unfortunately they come a dime a dozen.
