The first selfie? Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1523–24. (via vulture.com)
I am honored to be a part of Jerry Saltz’s take on the selfie in his column for this week’s New York Magazine. Check out the quote here:
Selfies are usually casual, improvised, fast; their primary purpose is to be seen here, now, by other people, most of them unknown, in social networks. They are never accidental: Whether carefully staged or completely casual, any selfie that you see had to be approved by the sender before being embedded into a network. This implies control as well as the presence of performing, self-criticality, and irony. The distributor of a selfie made it to be looked at by us, right now, and when we look at it, we know that. (And the maker knows we know that.) The critic Alicia Eler notes that they’re “where we become our own biggest fans and private paparazzi,” and that they are “ways for celebrities to pretend they’re just like regular people, making themselves their own controlled PR machines.”
read the full article on New York Magazine:
http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie.html
Thank you for the mention, Jerry Saltz. I am honored and flattered.
Thank you to my editors Hrag Vartanian, Jillian Steinhauer, and Mostafa Heddaya for your editorial guidance and ongoing commitment to the Hyperallergic selfie series, which started this whole conversation about selfies.
Check it out here: http://hyperallergic.com/tag/selfies/
