FROM ELVES TO SELFIES
Faculdade Cásper Líbero, São Paulo, Brasil
spersich@uol.com.br
Abstract
This article aims to discuss and analyze the new phenomenon that pervades social networks, the selfies. What meanings can hide such wave, such profusion almost ad nauseam of self images in this era of pretty much endless images? What is the cultural and imagetic difference between the old self-portrait and the contemporary selfie? Old and new dialogue in this text, passing through semiotics, communication and archetypal ideas of the Jungian thought, in this world of image-representation, image-editing in which the photographed is at the same time the editor of an imagined image.
Quietly they began to appear in social networks, in conversations, in discussions, and proliferated like mushrooms after a heavy summer rain. One of the phenomena of the 21st century, the selfie, according to the Oxford Dictionary (2013), is an informal photograph, a self-portrait taken with a mobile phone or a webcam and instantly shared on social networks. A phenomenon which, incidentally, does not make that much sense, for pictorial and imagistic representations have always favored portraits and even self-portraits. Art and photography books have always dealt with this subject, and many have tried to explain it from both the sociological and psychological points of view. I know of no photographer who has never made his/her self-portrait. But, let´s face it, it has grown to a scale that had never been imagined before the era of digital networks.
Four years ago I developed a course for the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM) entitled Photography and Symbolism, whose content I have discussed in several other courses and lectures throughout Brazil. In it, through mythological figures and literature, I tried to understand and analyze the myths, symbols and archetypes of contemporary society, always having the image as the backdrop, especially the photographic image, the portrait and the self-portrait.
Although the course is fairly recent, the theme of myth and photography has long intrigued me. Not by coincidence I did my Master´s and my PhD in the field of Social Psychology, and in my post doctorate I am also developing a study on mythology and identity construction of political characters, more precisely of Brazil´s presidents. But that is another story...
The first time I heard the word selfie was from the mouth of a freshman from the Cásper Líbero School of Journalism, in São Paulo. Interestingly, she was showing a self-portrait by the Chinese photographer Li Zhensheng, taken in communist China in the 1960s.
I decided to delve into this to try to understand how, out of the blue, such an archaic model of self-representation has become the darling of contemporaneity. To try to understand the symbolic behind this image and their senses nowadays. In the words of psychologist Carl G. Jung, “a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something beyond its obvious and immediate meaning” (1964:20).
The discussion is not new. Mythology and literature, as I already pointed out, have focused on this issue. How can we forget the myth of Narcissus, who was condemned to live an unfulfilled longing for love when he fell in love with his own image? For days and nights he stared at his picture reflected in the water, without ever getting to reach it. Or, if we think in the famous book by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1884-1900) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in which the subject portrayed never gets old: it is the picture that, over time, displays the wrinkles that should be on his face. This desire becomes for Dorian Gray a terrible reality. A slave to an absurd ideal, that of eternal youth, it makes art be confused with everyday life.
What then of the thousands of selfies circulating in the social networks? Anonymous and not so anonymous people. A phenomenon that spreads exponentially. Who does not remember Barack Obama’s selfie during the funeral of the South African leader Nelson Mandela in December of 2013? The self-portrait was taken with Prime-Ministers David Cameron, of the UK, and Helle Thorning Schmidt, of Denmark. The international media seemed not to like it.
Whenever I hear the word selfie, I do not know why, come to my mind the elves, which, according to Norse mythology, were creatures of the light. Young and beautiful demigods. And it seems to me that this is how people who publish their selfies see themselves, or would like to be seen. Shiny and luminous people. It is not always so. However, most times they are images devoid of composition, concepts and aesthetic concerns. The result leaves much to be desired, to say the least.
It is therefore in this context that I wish to discuss the self-portrait, or selfie, function of representation, setting and fiction in a society in which entertainment is the keynote of the culture of knowledge, of life.
1. Portrait, self-portrait and one’s self representation
Portraits are fascinating. Perhaps the most seductive and difficult language, both in painting and in photography. The synthesis of the meeting of the vision of an image producer and someone who lets himself/herself be “immortalized” through strokes or lenses. An exchange between objectivity and subjectivity and the desire to see and be seen.
There is a social and political attitude in the act of portraying and being portrayed. But unlike pictorial portraits, in which the imagination and gestures of painters are often valued more than the represented subject, the photographic portrait, born in the early days of photography, was used ideologically by the bourgeoisie of the second half of the 19th century with the aim of placing itself before the society of the time and of forging its own identity.
After all, born in the midst of a positivist philosophy, photography fit nicely with the idea of the cool and impartial look so dear to the thinkers of the time: “I only believe in what my eyes see.” “Honorific representation of the bourgeois self, the photographic portrait popularizes and transforms a traditional function by subverting the privileges inherent to the pictorial portrait”, says Annateresa Fabris. The author continues:
But the photographic portrait does much more. It contributes to the modern affirmation of the individual as it takes part in the configuration of his/her identity as a social identity. Every portrait is simultaneously a social act and a sociability act: in different moments of its history it obeys certain rules of representation governing the modalities of figuration of the model, the ostentation he/she makes of himself/herself, and the multiple symbolic perceptions raised in social exchanges. The model provides to the lenses not only his/her body but also his/her way of conceiving the material and social space, inserting himself/herself in a network of complex relationships of which the portrait is one of the most significant emblems (Fabris, 2004:38–39).
Used always with “noble” purposes, valued as an expression, described and reported both by writers and philosophers, the portrait raises multiple questions about its status. It is history or fiction? Reality or invention? Identity or otherness? “Photography builds a social identity, a standardized identity that often defies the concept of individuality, making possible to forge the most diverse typologies” (Fabris, 2004:15). But when we talk or think of portraits we are referring exactly to what? We often feel challenged by the Sphinx of Thebes: “Decipher me or I'll devour you.”
Fabris also points out that for the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) imagination is an essential part of a portrait: “The poet attributes to the portrayer a divinatory capacity, since it is his/her job to guess what is hided, besides capturing what is allowed to be seen” (Fabris, 2004:21). For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), the portrait falls into the realm of romance: “It is, above all, a product of the imagination, and yet no less true to the personality of the model”, as writes Fabris (2004:21).
In these almost 200 years since the invention of photography the portrait has always had prestige and was the subject of a number of analyses. Thus the amazement with the spread of selfies and of the idea that seems to be behind the importance of the self-portrait today, if there is a concept or a latent reflection in it at all.
It must be taken into account that this cult of the image and of the portrait is not recent. The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), in his book Filosofia da caixa preta (1983), points out the magical aspect of the image that precedes the technical picture. He speaks of the disappearance of the need for decoding a technical image (photography, film), since its meaning is imprinted automatically on the surface, like a fingerprint: “When photography becomes a model of thought, it changes the very structure of the existence, of the world and of society” (Flusser, 1983:73).
We seek similarities, memories, when we look at a photographic portrait. And not necessarily artistic or aesthetic originality. What we want is to unravel what that face means to us. Analyzing the relationship of the camera with the human face, Baudrillard makes of the portrait an act of defacement and stripping of the character of the model. Faced with the playacting that the individual makes of himself/herself, the lenses cannot idealize or transfigure him/her as image: capturing the similarity does not mean capturing the mask, the secret otherness that every being carries. What Baudrillard demands from photography is just that: not so much “to search for the identity behind appearances”, but “behind the identity make emerge the mask, the figure” of what haunts the human being and diverts it from its identity (FABRIS, 2004:75).
The fascination of the portrait and the self-portrait is precisely this: its fictional character (as, indeed, of any photograph), the possibility of creating, of posing, the construction of any number of characters acting in each photograph. It is a way, as Fabris points out, to “dodge once and for all the existence of the original subject”.
We are all the time ritualizing and recreating a good part of everyday life. The roles alternate, and photography ends up becoming one of the means used to consolidate this idea and give concreteness to what we are seeing. Vision is measured by our knowledge, by our construction of the world from the representations. And the representations reflect or imitate the social reality.
The French professor and researcher François Soulages raises an interesting controversy on this subject when he asks whether the portrayer is a photographer or a photography director. He raises the possibility of a photographic dramatization, the change of concept from “this existed” to “this was playacted”: “Is the portrait a genre that gives the object ‘one (or several) human being(s)’ to be photographed or is its practice that produces a photographic appearance of a visible phenomenon?” (2010:65–66). And then he ponders: “The photographic portrait is full of close tensions and contradictions: does it really distinguish itself from photography, which would be, like painting, the competence of art? Maybe this is just a fact?” (2010:66).
If it is a fact, it is possible to analyze the contemporary selfie from the perspective of the entertainment society, or of a civilization of the spectacle, as defined the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (2013).
In a society in which you're worth something when you become visible, the rapid spread of an image via social networks allows for immediacy in the integration to a world of consumption, leisure and a “pseudo” way out of anonymity. If each period has an eye and a representation undoubtedly the 21st century’s is that of visibility. No matter how much or what we do for that to happen. Aesthetic relations that give us the impression of belonging when in fact they offer just traces: what about the civilization of the spectacle? It is a civilization of a world in which the first place in the current value raking is occupied by entertainment, in which having fun, escaping boredom, is the universal passion. This ideal of life is perfectly legitimate, no doubt. Only a fanatical Puritan could blame the members of a society who want to give playfulness, relaxation, humor and fun to lives normally engaged in depressing and sometimes stultifying routines. But transforming into a supreme value this natural propensity to have fun has unexpected consequences: the trivialization of culture, the generalization of frivolity ... (Vargas Llosa, 2013:30).
In the case of photography, it is always good to remember that building an image is never a copy of an external world, but the realization of the imaginary of a subject within a society, a culture, a given historical moment. Images that pass for social representations.
2. Representation and contemporary image
Social psychologist Serge Moscovici departs from the study of social representations to understand how and why humans act and think in a certain way, affirming the historic character of consciousness. In other words, how the subject is presented and represented through the images he/she builds when he/she wants to know and appropriate the world.
From the moment that the image becomes one of the main forms of knowledge and of transmission of this knowledge, we no longer live our experiences directly and start to experience them through the representations: “everything that used to be directly lived has become a representation” (Debord, 1997:13).
In our case, today knowledge or recognition passes through the selfie: when reflecting on the identity imprinted in photographic portraits, Roland Barthes refers to an imprecise, if not imaginary, identity, often close to myths and stereotypes, to the point that it is possible to speak of similarity even in the face of unknown models. Questioning the identity of the photographed subject leads the author to a radical conclusion: the individual resembles infinitely the other images of himself/herself, he/she is a copy of a copy, whether real or mental (Fabris, 2004:115).
We have thus moved beyond the time in which the portrait and the self-portrait meant much more a discovery of identity or of affirmation in the world, a way to place ourselves in society as unique beings, to the selfie, a craze that, although somehow also inserting us into a context, leaves uniqueness aside and makes us all look the same. The same poses, the same smiles, creating a break between the subject, the self, and the image, which is increasingly featured as a pose. An imposed rule, in which the apparent spontaneity and the speed with which the images are disseminated through social networks lead us to believe in the authenticity of the portrait and the portrayed.
In a narcissistic society, in which little is produced and reproduced, selfies feature, as Umberto Eco (1984:60) would say, an “allegory of consumer society”, a false individualism, focused on the rapid achievement of the desire to be seen, to achieve visibility, and thus to begin to exist in a society in which image and entertainment are inseparable.
The forms of this neo-individualism centered on the primacy of self-realization are countless. Alongside the subjective autonomy, hedonism and psychologism, a new relationship with the body has developed: obsession with health, cult of sports, fitness, leanness, beauty care, cosmetic surgery... manifestations of a narcissistic society (Lipovetsky; Serroy, 2011:48).
There is no innocent look. Photography is always the construction of a representation. As Boris Kossoy reminds us (2007:54), every photograph is a creation, “a testimony that materializes from a process of creation, i.e., construction. In this construction lies the aesthetics of representation.”
In the aestheticized world we live in, representation involves the immediacy of a fact and a situation. Today’s photograph, the self-portrait, is not intent to be more heroic, but rather an image that plays with banality. Selfies will probably be replaced soon by another representative form of the way we see ourselves and how we want to be seen.
This article was published in the book “Comunicação, Entretenimento e Imagem”, Dimas A. Kunsch e Simonetta Persichetti (org), Plêiade Editora, São Paulo, 2013.
References
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FABRIS, Annateresa. Virtual identities: a reading of the photographic portrait. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2004.
FLUSSER, Vilém. Philosophy of black box: essays for a future philosophy of photography. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2002.
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