Tourist making a selfie in Paris
The Selfie as a Neoliberal Commodity
Is the selfie a form of narcissistic self-marketing?
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Artdoc
Outside the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, just as all over the globe, tourists are taking photos with their smartphone, which they are holding with a selfie stick. The selfie seems to have become the largest form of expression for the globalized citizen. Is the selfie a form of expression or a form of narcissistic self-marketing, an indispensable tool for sustaining oneself in the world of social media and the sale of the individual?
Photographers have been making self-portraits since the invention of the camera. Of course, even before in painting, the self-portrait was a well-known form of self-expression. The expression of the individual was one of the essential characteristics of the Renaissance. Modern man was born and the yoke of the Theocratic Middle Ages was shed. Interestingly, in addition to the cultural backgrounds that led to the development of the self-portrait, the creation of this form was only possible through technical innovation: the discovery of the mirror. As James Hall noted in his book Self-Portrait, a cultural history, (Hall, 2015) artists were able to study themselves through the mirror for the first time because they could view their face as an independent image on a flat surface. The mirror surface of the water, which made the Greek mythological figure Narcissus love himself, was massively produced on metal.
Albrecht Dürer is seen as one of the first artists to make self-portraits. Later, in the Golden Age, Rembrandt's often confronting and challenging self-portraits show the artist in all his honesty and openness. Centuries later, Van Gogh is one of the best examples of a painter who portrayed himself in an expressive and uncompromising manner. Characteristic of many self-portraits from art history is their investigative and confrontational nature. The artists were not interested in a glamorous image of themselves, they were looking for an imagination of their inner psychological search.
Happy Self
The self-portraits taken along the history of photography show a relentless lust for self-examination, whereby artists did not avoid self-mockery and humour. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard portrayed himself as a drowned man in his Self-portrait as a Drowned Man, as a result of his fictitious suicide after losing recognition of the invention of photography. Man Ray made many self-portraits in the 1930s, not so much to portray the search for his soul, but as part of his creative quest within the framework of Dadaism. Cindy Sherman also created self-portraits, but she made them to deconstruct the female identity imposed by the popular media. Duane Michals used images of himself to tell stories that were not visible in the photo. Nan Goldin has become synonymous with revealing self-portraits. Her famous self-portrait Nan one month after being battered, showing her battered face with bloodshot eyes, as a result of domestic violence, is characteristic of the investigative attitude of contemporary photographers. Goldin said of her self-portraits: “My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change.” (Self Portrait; Nan Goldin, 2000) Characteristic of all artistic creative self-portraits is the desire to break through the surface of outer appearance of the self and to tell the inner story that an image usually does not show.
But this desire for visual honesty was not shared by the general public who discovered photography. After all, the average person was mainly looking for a way to show him-or-herself in the most interesting and beautiful manner as possible. This is clearly reflected in the cartes de visite invented by André Disdéri. On the cartes de visite, a precursor to our current business card, portraits were depicted that were meticulously staged to construct identity. There is a carte de visite of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha holding a book, dressed in three-piece suit, seated next to a Greek column, and on the table a small statue of Venus. The French photographer Camille Silvy managed to use the right props in order to construct the image of the Royal intellectual, who loved art and culture.
It is striking that the cartes de visites mainly emphasized the dignity and social position of the person. The smile did not yet exist in 19th century photography, with its cultural roots in painting. Above all, a portrait had to be a worthy image of the person and a smile was seen as the characteristic of an uncontrolled attitude - perhaps even emblematic of a drunk. In addition, it practically was very difficult to hold a smile in a natural way with long shutter speeds.
Only with the arrival of the $ 1 Kodak Brownie the general public could start photographing themselves: shutter speeds became faster, and the smile was born. The serious face of the cultural elite made way for the smiling crowd, fed by Kodak's advertising campaigns. These campaigns mainly emphasized the pleasure of photography. Christina Kotchemidova, in her study Why We Say “Cheese”: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography, (Kotchemidova, 2004) states that the manufacturer Kodak could create the ideology of the smiling pose with the help of the new technology. Emphasizing the pleasure of consumption became a breakthrough in advertisements and partly caused Kodak to appeal to the bon vivant with the new camera, with the promise that you only had to press a button and they did the rest. Kotchemidova: "The code for the lucky self, became the cultural norm."
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Online Identity
Cameras improved in the course of the 20th century, including the rise of colour photography, but despite the advances in photographic technology, nothing essentially changed in the way consumers used photography. Oftentimes fathers photographed the happy faces of their families during the holidays. A self-portrait would be found selfish and antisocial in the family-oriented society.
This changed dramatically in the beginning of this century with the arrival of the smartphone. The selfie, as an expression of individualistic society, was born. The selfie became the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year 2013 with the meaning: "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website". ('Selfie' named by Oxford Dictionaries as word of 2013, 2013)
The specific feature of the selfie is not only the self-portrait itself, but above all the explicit display on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even on the popular dating app Tinder.
This makes the selfie an appropriate means for the citizen to profile himself in his personal network. The selfie is the digital individualistic version of the Kodak Brownie holiday photo. The selfie maker is not the 20th century family man who photographs his wife and children for the family album, but rather is the teenager, the movie star, the adventurer, the globetrotter or the happy single. In short, it is the postmodern citizen and even the modern refugee, who portrays himself and immediately uploads his image to social media. Movie stars and heads of state are notorious selfie makers, and even Pope Francis regularly takes selfies with his supporters.
The selfie culture is one of the most obvious manifestations of our neoliberal society with an unlikely production of millions of photos per day.
The modern-day equivalent of the development of the mirror in the Renaissance, is smartphone with a camera in the 21st century. The smartphone, configured with a with a front camera, functions as a mirror: one can see oneself on the display of the camera, with the current novelty that the "mirror image" can be captured and distributed. The mirror also becomes a shop window. The selfie creates an image of the maker, the way he wants to show himself to the outside world. The selfie-maker wants to show himself beautiful, interesting, tough, authentic, special, adventurous, and in any case positive.
Because almost everyone owns a smartphone, the selfie is the most democratic tool of the visual identity construction of the globalized online citizen. The selfie allows the maker to shape, grind and put his life into the digital shopwindow again and again. The selfie thus becomes fundamentally different from the mirror from the Renaissance: the selfie starts to lead its own life independently of the maker.
Characteristic of this online identity is that the external appearance of the selfie-taker is the main ingredient, whereby the identity is reduced to a visual presentation. The selfie creates a mere identification with the outer image that the selfie-taker has of himself and not with his inner world of experience. This explains why the selfie is interpreted as an unbridled form of narcissism. Even worse, various psychiatrists describe self-making as an addiction and a mental disorder, named as ‘selfitis’. Many psychologists regard the obsession with online identity as the curse of our time, because selfitis patient threatens to lose control of his self-fabricated identity.
Selfie as a commodity
A study by Ohio University among men between the ages of 18 and 40 found a correlation between narcissism and self-psychopathy in male selfie-taker. (Linshi, 2015) There was a connection between increased narcissism and men who extensively improved their selfie. A connection was also found with forms of self-objectification: finding your physical appearance as the most important thing. In another study entitled Tagger’s Delight? among students from European Business Schools, the researchers concluded that the more selfies the students placed, the fewer social contacts they had. (Houghton, David and Joinson, Adam and Caldwell, Nigel and Marder, Ben, 2013) The selfie was therefore used by the students as a means of grabbing attention.
But there are other analyses that place narcissism in a broader context. Researcher Bent Fausting of the University of Copenhagen says: "The selfie is about reflection, identity and recognition - people want to keep control over how they are seen."
The selfie taker is not dependent anymore on the gaze of another person. He takes his own portrait and gets likes for it. Fausting: “An image of itself is not necessarily narcissistic. It is necessary for the constitution and existence of an ego that wants recognition."
Daniel Rubenstein, a lecturer at the University of Art in London, claims that the selfie is a new social phenomenon that challenges the age-old rigid identity. In his thesis The Gift of the Selfie he says: "The selfie teaches that life consists of networks and when I go from one network to another, I am not the same; my ego adapts to the context.” (Rubinstein, 2016)
The selfie shows that the ego is not a stable identity, as people have always believed, but a construction. According to Rubenstein, the difference between traditional photography and selfie is sharing the photos. “The sharing of the selfie is its content, and in this act of sharing the very “I” is being complicated, problematized and situated as a relationship with others, a relationship that is established by an economy of sharing. This is not the "I" of Descartes’ Cogito in which the subject always knows himself by taking thought as the undeniable ground of its existence.”
According to Rubenstein the selfie also debunks the long-standing claim of traditional photography to the truth. “The selfie is perhaps the first form of popular photography that does not make truth its explicit goal.” That is why the selfie cannot be subjected to the old semiological analysis, which assumes a clear relationship between photography and reality.
Cultural critic Henry Giroux puts the debate about narcissism of selfie in a broader context in his study Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State Surveillance. (Giroux, 2015) The selfie fits the pattern of the neo-liberal society in which everything is a commodity, even the personality of the individual. Man sells himself to man. According to Giroux, the selfie is not a cultural fringe phenomenon, but it basically reflects the core values of the market-driven society, in which self-interest is the measure. Instead of the selfie connecting people to each other, it alienates people from each other, because they are now viewed from the function of market-driven capitalism. The selfie expresses that the individual is responsible for his own happiness and not the social environment.
The selfie isolates the individual from his environment. “Selfie culture is now a part of a market driven economy that encourages selfies as an act of privatization and consumption not as a practice that might support the public good.” And: "The fragmentation of society that also glorifies the popularity of selfie is fuelled not only by the neoliberal urge of unbridled individualism, but also by a weakening of public values and the impoverishment of collective and involved politics," according to Henry Giroux.
So, we cannot regard the selfie as an innocent form of popular culture of the postmodern citizen, but as a phenomenon of capitalism: the total sale of the ego. The selfie culture seems a victory of the market mechanism in the most personal area: now every person has to sell himself as a commodity.
Researcher Harry Brandrick states that the rise of neo-liberalism and consumerist culture, is linked with technological advances, like the virtually limitless possibility of communication.
Examining the traits of neoliberalism, he concludes: “We could argue that this collective individualism is the result of the neo-liberal ideology emanating from the small percentage of the population with more power, dominating the economy, politics, commerce and media, in short-virtually all cultural and mental production.” (Brandrick, 2015).
The selfie capitalism is now all around us, hidden in a shrewd market system and fuelled by the social media, especially Instagram.
(Anti) Selfie Culture
The rise of the selfie prompts the question of how selfie culture is going to change photography and whether that has consequences for the way we deal with photography. The selfie meets the basic characteristic of communication. Many studies indicate that we are more inclined to respond to photos with faces and in social media it appears that there are more likes with photos of close-ups of faces. And various studies that have been done about the selfie, show that most communication contains an element of self-promotion.
Advertising campaigns already use selfies in their photography. Axe Deodorant placed large billboards on Time Square for their #kiss for peace campaign with a selfie of a young couple. For the campaign #WakeUpCall to raise money for Syria, Unicef used selfies from celebrities such as Naomi Campbell. (Fisher, 2014)
In autonomous art photography, one sees a counter-reaction to the selfie. Not the human being as an eternal holiday maker, adventurer or desirable beauty, celebrity and seducer is the subject of the self-examination of the creative photographer, but the honesty of the doubt, the search for himself in times of crisis and melancholy. The answer of contemporary photographers is a reappraisal of the authentic expression versus the superficiality of the smile. Not an ‘me imagino, ergo sum’, but a ‘studeo, ergo sum’. (Not a 'I make an image of myself, so I exist', but 'I study myself, so I exist').
In the recent history of photography and art there are numerous examples of a selfie culture avant-la-lettre, like the many self-portraits of Andy Warhol, made in the 1960s.
Some artists, mostly women, are using the selfie as a weapon for change, as is summed up in an article in the HuffPost. (Frank, 2015). The remarkable trait of all of them is that they show themselves, often on Instagram, in an anti-aesthetic pose, like the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo.
Others, like the Italian photographer Giacomo Brunelli for example, photographed his own shadow as a form of self-portrait in order to portray his questions about himself. (Brunelli, 2019) The American photographer Alec Soth posted a series on Instagram that he called "unselfies", in which his face was always invisible or obscured by mist, snow or water. (Soth, 2015)
In the series You and your selfies British photographer Paula Rae Gibson made selfies of herself when her husband died in order to feel that she was alive. In this way artists go their own way as a reaction to the selfie culture. (Gibson)
Positive approaches see the selfie as the contemporary version of the art masters’ self-portraits. (Benjamin, 2017). In the Saatchi Gallery an exhibition was named From Selfie to Self-Expression. The public contributed selfies appeared to be less narcissistic and more investigative than expected. Or can we say that the selfie is considered as fine art, because the celebrity selfies sell well? (Allen, 2019)
Also, in other places, the world of high art and those of the popular selfie come together, such as in the Louvre, where every day hundreds of tourists crowd around to take a selfie with the greatest art icon in history. A selfie with the Mona Lisa is probably not an expression of profound contemplation about art, but a proof of survival in a slaughter field of millions of travel-loving egos. (Malik, 2019)
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