Self-portraits and selfies: are they really similar?
Having been taking self-portraits for over 10 years now, and selfies since I got my first phone with a front-facing camera, I’ve always made a distinction between the two.
And for the past few years, I’ve been seeing exhibitions and articles that always leave me a little sceptical: those that use selfies as synonymous with self-portraits.
Sceptical, because I have always wondered whether a self-portrait of Helene Schjerfbeck could be linked to a selfie taken by anyone in front of their bathroom mirror.
Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
I have written and rewritten this article several times because the subject is interesting but really vast. As I said before, I’m a visual artist and in my work, I take a lot of self-portraits. In everyday life, I also regularly take selfies. I saw the nuance of this from the beginning: I think about them, create them, post them and anchor them in a totally different way. That’s why, before I saw the exhibition “From Selfie To Self-expression”, I didn’t really understand how we could combine the two. Of course, it goes without saying that both are a portrait of oneself produced by oneself but there are undeniable nuances between the two.
As the history of art shows, the self-portrait is a work that requires know-how, skills, research (and sometimes failures), time… and it’s always part of a tradition, an artistic heritage. The person who makes a self-portrait does so according to themselves and what they want to express. They do it for themselves before doing it for others. But this doesn’t prevent the artist from trying to convey an idea and question the world through their self-portrait. With all this, the self-portrait is anchored in the history of art and ensures its durability.
With the selfie, it’s a different story. First of all, the selfie is much more accessible since, by definition, it is a photo of oneself that one takes with one’s smartphone and immediately posts on social networks. So it can be done by anyone who has a smartphone and the internet. It’s also much quicker to take: even if we can spend a few moments finding the right angle, the right light, the right filter, it will only take a few minutes between taking the selfie and publishing it.
The selfie is a form of communication. It’s a message that says “hey, I’m here / I’m doing this / I’m with this person”. It’s a proof, a kind of testimony.
By being posted on social networks, this message is constructed according to the external gaze: through our photos, we seek the reactions of others, even their approval I’d say. The selfie is posted as quickly as it is taken, it’s immediate… and then we move on. Do you recall the selfie you took last month?
One artist’s self-portrait may remind us of another artist’s self-portrait, but in any case, each artist will have their own universe and approach. But in selfies, by dint of wanting to be considered and liked by others, one seems to lose all originality.
However, there’s one thing self-portraits and selfies have in common: control over our image. Taking a self-portrait or a selfie is about choosing the frame, the light, the angle, the pose and even the right clothes. It’s a carefully chosen, posed, staged image. It can be empowering as well as accentuate the darker points of our identities and lives. It’s up to us to choose what we want to express.
It’s certain that even when we want to obtain an image “close to reality”, we will always only get an alter-ego. We pose and create avatars that we would like to be in real life.
Self-portraiture is, in my opinion, the opposite of portraiture in that the latter will reveal more of who we really are as the result will indicate how we are perceived by others. Something we have not chosen.
Self-portraiture and selfies are about freedom and choice. They allow us to play on the credibility of our viewers. With the selfie, we seek the approval of our contacts… on images that are ultimately distorted, idealized. And if we think, for example, of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, many of them are full of pain but they remain chosen representations.
I was on holiday when I took this black-and-white selfie that half shows my face. In reality, I had a sunburn on my forehead, a mark that wasn’t very pretty to look at. With my phone at the end of my arm, I was able to reveal what I wanted.
Self-portraits and selfies are now meeting in the art world, notably with great Cindy Sherman. As a reminder, Cindy Sherman is an American artist, known for her different series of self-portraits in which she deploys settings, make-up, clothes, poses and appropriate moods to question the society in which we live.
For the past few years, she has been regularly posting selfies on Instagram with excessive retouching and cheesy captions in which the artist seems to mock the selfie-Instagram phenomenon. In this way, she creates works that can easily integrated into her artistic universe and that establish a logical continuation of her previous series.
In 2017, the Saatchi Gallery partnered with Huawei to create the exhibition “From Selfie To Self Expression”. I was able to see this exhibition and although I enjoyed it very much, it left me a little bit doubtful.
I remember seeing the works of the great masters of self-portraits such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt or even Egon Schiele in a “digital” way, i.e. the works were unfortunately not the paintings themselves but were visible on screens, like much, much bigger phone screens. And the visitor was invited to “like” the works, like one likes selfies (and so one understands better the relation to the theme of the exhibition). The exhibition was rich in well-known and important self-portraits. For example, there were self-portraits by Cindy Sherman (the beautiful “Untitled Film Stills”), Tracey Emin, Francesca Woodman, installations by Tim Noble & Sue Webster, etc.
Concerning the selfies, several works attracted me by their statements and results. Among them were the thousands of videos collected and projected by Christopher Baker in the work “Hello World! Or How: I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise”. The videos came from the internet (Youtube, Myspace & Facebook) and each one showed an individual talking from home to an imaginary crowd, like a diary transformed into something visible to others.
Faced with these selfies in video format, the spectator found himself drowned in a space saturated with images and sounds, until all he heard was just a big hubbub (hence the title). A very interesting experience.
I also remember seeing a photograph by Antoine Geiger, from his SUR-FAKE series, which I liked a lot. In this series, people are literally absorbed by the phone screens they are looking at or taking selfies with. Through this process, the artist questions the alienating relationship we have with our mobile phones. How, like drug addicts, we have become dependent on them, how they have become extensions of our own bodies. We also see that by taking pictures of ourselves everywhere and all the time, we manage to focus more on the image we are going to send to others rather than the environment we are in. We are captivated by these screens and we forget what is important.
In a more humorous tone, there were photographs from Alison Jackson’s “Mental Images” series, where she created personal moments of famous people (royalty, presidents, actors…) with lookalikes and where the selfie was sometimes present. Playing on the limit between reality and fiction and on the way people are perceived through the tabloids, Alison Jackson plunges us into scenes of a disconcerting but really funny realism. In particular with a staged shot of a selfie taken by a fake William and Kate at the birth of the fake Prince George. Funny because it’s completely crazy to see such a photo, funny to imagine taking a selfie at that moment and… funny because taking this selfie makes the royal family look like ordinary people.
But there were also photographs that I had less interest in and that made me wonder why they were there. This is particularly true of Jean Pigozzi’s countless selfies with celebrities. I cannot deny they are about self-expression, but what about the artistic approach? It’s a collection of encounters, but I don’t understand the creative potential of these images. For me, it comes down to the typical selfie we take, that we add to our collection but eventually forget over time.
To the question “Self-portraits and selfies: are they really similar?”, I think we can consider that selfies (and what can be created around them) can be placed with self-portraits when they are part of an artistic process and questioning.
I’ve often seen this term “from self-portrait to selfie”, as if there was an evolution from one to the other, but I don’t think that’s really the case.
The selfie is certainly a representation of the self, but as we have seen above, it is a completely different monstration with a completely different objective than the self-portrait. It cannot therefore replace it, but it can be seen as another way of revealing oneself. However, when the selfie is created with an artistic will behind it, one understands that there can be a cohabitation between the two genres. I do think that distinctions have to be made.
