From Self Portrait to Selfie: Memes Come True

This week's reading focuses on the art of self imaging, and its relationship with performance, self-reflection, and narcissism. This chapter helped me to see the variety that exists within the broad genre of "self-portraiture". It also raises some interesting questions about the "truth" of photographs. Self portraits are by definition "staged", but does this make them any less true? The very existence of these staged photographs provokes the acknowledgment of the "impossibility of transparent photographs". A photograph is never reality, though our minds may be inclined to equate the two at a passing glance. Nor, however, can they be seen as essentially "untrue". Even a staged scene was lived, though it was merely "a life lived to be photographed". This implicit "truth" value of photographs can lend itself to deceptive capacities not afforded by other mediums. The chapter cites the Instagram project helmed by Amalia Ulman. Through a sequence of posted photographs and captions, observers were fooled into believing that a constructed, fictional story was in fact taking place in reality. Upon the reveal at the end of the piece, viewers' reactions varied; some were stunned, others distressed, and still others claimed to have known it was a ruse all along. This project raises similar questions to that of the self portrait itself; those of identity, artistic liberty, and most importantly, truth.