Lecturer: Prof. Paul Frosh, Hebrew University 

Room: 7052, Rabin

12.5, 12:15-13:45

 

Over the past few years the selfie has emerged to prominence as an everyday cultural practice and photographic genre of extraordinary popularity - accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by public controversy and hostility. At the same time the selfie has also become an object of burgeoning scholarly interest. Surprisingly, however, relatively little work has theorized the aesthetics of the selfie. This paper seeks to fill that gap. Reconfiguring three concepts from traditional photography theory – indexicality, composition and reflection – this paper argues that the selfie is a communicative gesture, linking it to forms of mediated mobility across real and informational spaces and to the bodily operation of digital interfaces. It ultimately casts selfies as a radical departure from traditional photography and as a novel agent of digital sociability rather than of narcissism.