From Duluth News Tribune, January 4, 2018, by Christa Lawler:
Self-portrait of author Alicia Eler, whose book “The Selfie Generation” was published in November. Photo submitted by ElerA celebrity posts a buzzed-about selfie. A cat finds a way to navigate a recording device, takes a selfie. A man is on a plane that is crashing, takes a selfie. Alicia Eler was on it.
In the early 2010s, the then-freelance writer covered the pictures-of-oneself beat in what was loosely called ‘The Selfie Column’ for Hyperallergic, a contemporary arts blog.
“The selfie is so context specific,” Eler said in a recent phone interview from Minneapolis, where she is now the visual arts critic/arts reporter for the Star Tribune. “How is it perceived, versus what did the person mean to say. How did people react to it. I was interested in all the ways that the selfie is understood or judged. I wanted to get more information. As a journalist, (we) are always looking for more information.”
The column and the subject both grew: The selfie submissions kept coming, she said. The selfie news was unyielding. “Selfie” was named word of the year in 2013. After four years of curating selfie content, Eler developed a reputation as a go-to for intellectualizing selfies. Both the Washington Post and New York magazine have called on her expertise.
And now, a book: Eler’s “The Selfie Generation: How Our Self Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent and Culture” was published in late 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing. The 300-plus page pop culture critique considers the point-shoot-develop selfies of yesteryear and the role of the selfie in a 24/7 news culture. She delves into selfies as performance art, selfies as politics, selfies and fake news, selfies and vanity.
(Of note: It gets a blurb from Duluth-y comedian Maria Bamford.)
Eler will present a gallery talk from 6-7 p.m. Tuesday at the Duluth Art Institute.
HER SELF(IE)
Part of the interest, Eler said, was her own relationship with selfies. She came of selfie age in the day of film cameras. She writes about posing for portraits, then getting the images developed at her suburban Chicago Walgreens.
But, unlike today, nobody saw them.
“The self portraits I took were my own reflections. They were for me; they were a way for me to see how I appeared to myself and, ultimately, an attempt to see how others saw me,” she writes in “Selfie Generation.”
Eler studied art history at Oberlin College and has written for Artforum, Artsy and other art-specific publications — in addition to LA Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, CNN and more. The idea of a selfie column for Hyperallergic was appealing because if was a regular writing gig and, “I’m pretty fascinated by broad cultural trends and visual culture,” she said.
In writing the book, Eler said, she developed compassion for the teens who are “obviously selfie-ing away on SnapChat, etc., because that’s part of socializing at that age,” she wrote in an email. “So, the selfie for me really does represent adolescence — other people’s, and my own.”
SELFIE
After years of selfie-talk, Eler said the selfie sub-topic that continues to interest her is visual artists who come at it critically. Amalia Ulman created a series of selfies — a bit of performance art — of three different personaes: the “Tumblr girl,” the “sugar-baby ghetto girl,” and the “girl next door.” Her Instagram feed reflected the visuals that supported the identities.
“I thought that was an interesting way to play with the selfie as a genre or form,” Eler said. “People bought into it. When she revealed it was a performance, people felt lied to. That made me think of how quick people are to believe what they see on social media and are upset when it’s not true.”
Eler, who has used the internet for her own performance art and comedy, doesn’t have the same expectations of a selfie. Asked for her favorite of all time, she noted two: One is of a man who posed for a shot with his girlfriend in front of Hungary’s Parliament. His girlfriend sneezed, and the panoramic pic gave her two heads, one posed, one mid-sneeze; The other is a group selfie at a plantation in Louisiana that reveals the ghostly image in the window behind the selfiers.
“It could have been Photoshopped in for sure, but maybe it wasn’t, and that’s amazing,” Eler said. “I love that.”
SELFIE GENERATION
As for the book, Eler is trying to get it into college libraries and contacting professors in queer studies departments to see if they’re interested in a few chapters, she said. By the end of March, she will be done marketing the book, and she can start thinking about something else for a while. Ideally, stand-up comedy — which she said she misses enough that she performed an entire bit about charcoal toothpaste recently to an employee at the Wedge, a Minneapolis co-op.
(After explaining all of the problems with all-natural toothpaste in the form of a black gel, she returned it. “That’s my maximum crunchy level,” she told the employee. “I can’t go further.”)
This book marks a certain time and place, she said. In a decade, people will leave the selfiers alone: “It won’t be such a terrible thing,” she said. “The social norms around it will be more clear. People will refer back to my book and say, ‘Oh yeah, remember that writer Alicia Eler? She wrote about this 10 years ago.'”
IF YOU GO
What: Gallery Talk with Alicia Eler
When: 6-7 p.m. Jan. 9
Where: Duluth Art Institute, 506 W. Michigan St.
Alicia Eler’s new book gets selfie treatment. Photo from Eler
Title: “The Selfie Generation: How Our Self Images Are Changing Our Notions Of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture”
Author: Alicia Eler
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Pages: 315
Price: $24.99
