#192: Annihilation of the selfie
Good morning!
This past summer, when I realized it had been years since I’d regularly taken selfies, I asked my subscribers if their relationship with photographing themselves had changed, and if so, why. People had a lot to say, and naturally so do I (lol), so I finally decided to write about it.
The way to take a decent picture of myself was to convey the precise middle-ground between posing and not posing. To attempt to appear totally unposed was transparently false, but to pose too intentionally seemed gauche, overly invested in the outcome. For over 10 years of selfie-taking, I sought the exact point at which fraudulence and desperation could be maximally avoided without crossing over into the other. Relaxed stance, small smile, eyes cast downward at the screen, the self—to stare off into the distance was too manufactured, but to stare into the camera lens was equally misguided, too eager to be seen.
In 1980, Roland Barthes described a similar neuroticism in Camera Lucida: “Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes,” he wrote. “I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality.” He’s never satisfied with his results, though. The photos fail over and over to capture his essence, depicting instead something “heavy, motionless, stubborn,” where off-camera he is “light, divided, dispersed.”
During my peak selfie-taking years, I didn’t notice a lack of depth in my own photos; I was more caught up in the details: the position of my bangs, the angle of my nose, where to put my hand. My routine grew increasingly second-nature as time passed, approaching a kind of pseudo-authenticity: If I could take a decent photo fairly quickly, did that count as “being natural” in front of the camera? Or had I just made my efforts more efficient, learning to address my insecurities with an invisible orchestra of instant, subconscious adjustments?
I adapted the routine for times I was being photographed by someone else: a bigger, friendlier smile, but not too gummy; if possible, my right (better) side angled toward the camera. If sitting, legs crossed away from the photographer (slimming); if standing, the closer leg bent rather than the further leg (lengthening). Never placing an arm on my hip (too try-hard), chin tilted upward to convey a care-free attitude, eyes smiling enough to not seem dead inside, which is funny if you think about it.
You’re so photogenic, people often told me. This either felt like a compliment or an insult, depending on how much I thought they knew. Regardless, it made me feel ashamed, because I knew the truth. To look good in a photo you tried hard to look good in wasn’t a recognition of beauty, but a recognition of effort. Of course, I often didn’t even feel my efforts paid off, which was worse. As Alan Watts once put it: “The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.”
My selfies started tapering off sometime around 2020, and then a few months ago, I realized I’d barely photographed myself in over three years, and had largely stopped being photographed by other people, too. This became especially clear after a few publications asked me for recent photos and my only options were five years old. When I tried to take new ones, it felt foreign and profane. I’d become a kind of photographic recluse. To someone of a different ilk, this probably wouldn’t register. But for me, a writer who’s been indulging and dissecting her own vanity for a decade (and still cares to put together an outfit), it felt like a veritable shift in my relationship with the world, and with myself.
Once I noticed the shift, I started to wonder if it held any deeper insights about aging or motherhood. Or maybe we’d all just been through a pandemic and got sick of Instagram. In August, I asked my subscribers if they were still taking photos of themselves. The majority said they’d slowed down, too (wildly skewed data, not making any claims about humanity overall). I was intrigued to note that those who said they still took selfies trended younger, and many cited aims that I’d begun to doubt my own photos could achieve: documenting their lives, capturing a mood, boosting their confidence, affirming who they were or how they felt. At least three people (non-selfie-takers) related to my use of the word profane to describe taking selfies. Profane. Why was that word hitting?
In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which could be about Instagram but is actually about postmodern life more broadly, he writes that, taken on its own terms, the spectacle is an “affirmation of appearances,” but to understand its essential character—to transcend its enthralling but superficial project—is to see that it’s actually a visible negation of life. This might explain why, sometimes, these days, I feel like a thief when taking photos of myself. Like instead of documenting something true, I’m actively falsifying it. How unholy, how profane!
For a long time, my impulse to photograph myself came from an aspirational place. As a young adult interested in being self-possessed but not quite knowing how to be, imitating the sort of person I wanted to be in photos or online felt like an externalized expression of an inward search. When I succeeded—took a photo I liked, even if it took me a long time to get it right—the result felt like confirmation that self-possession was possible, like I had autonomy in my own becoming. It didn’t feel self-negating, at least consciously, until I did have a better sense of who I was, and then the project took on a more sinister spirit.
I experienced this transition as a growing humiliation at my own photographic tics. Suddenly, posing felt too directly like hiding the parts of me I was otherwise working to embrace. The youthful search had become denial, containment. So instead of getting the right angle, the challenge became: What if I didn’t take the photo at all? What would it feel like to experience myself only as a participant rather than an object? To never have visual confirmation of how an outfit looked, or a moment appeared, but instead be forced to surrender to total immersion in the present, whatever loss of “memory-making” that required?
“[O]ne of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people,” Watts wrote. “Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious.” In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts suggests that in our efforts to be secure and certain about ourselves and the world, we end up deadening ourselves to a greater truth. He says we can’t understand life and its mysteries by containing them—that it would be like trying to contain a river in a bucket. “To ‘have’ running water, you must let go of it and let it run.”
At some point, my notion of beauty stopped feeling like something that could be performed, depicted, or captured, and started feeling more ephemeral; a vaporous thing that could only be witnessed and embodied in concert with everything else. My selfies worked better before I saw it like that. After, they felt like an advertisement for something I no longer wanted to sell. But I know it doesn’t have to be like that—selfies only even used as a sales pitch or an existential pacifier. My friend Mallory told me that, for her, accepting the wider variety of ways she might look caused her to switch from taking no photos of herself to taking more of them.
I appreciate that self-portraiture can be a true artistic medium, or a form of record-keeping, or even a pure utility, like when friends send photos to each other to get opinions, which happen to be some of the most authentic self-portraits in my phone. I think it’s too prescriptive to say selfies represent any one perspective or pathology—vanity, confidence, insecurity, curiosity, playfulness, fraudulence. They’re a tool like anything else. For me, they became a trap of my own making—a practice I told myself was fun and affirming but was actually, in time, the opposite.
The last couple rolls of film Avi shot, whenever he pointed the camera at me, I tried not to manipulate myself. I didn’t adjust my hair or clothing, I didn’t pose to look thinner or less sloppy, I didn’t adjust my face to obscure some aspect of my proportions I’ve never really understood anyway. And in the resulting photos I see a version of me I’ve never seen before. My body in postures I don’t recognize, my face lit up from new angles. Pushing a stroller outside Coney Island on my birthday, leaning over a bowl of noodles in a dress, laying on the rug in my pajamas, eyes closed, Sunny’s face pressed against mine. The photos feel mysterious and alive in a way my posed ones never did. Finally, I don’t appear to be outside of life, bending it to my will, but lost somewhere in the midst of it.
My favorite thing I read last week was “Death of the Party,” by Raven Leilani for N+1, a moving essay about the lack of closure afforded by grief, and making art (or not) from inside of it. Last week’s 15 things also included my new shoes I’ve worn for a week straight, the perfect Julianne Moore movie, an old children’s book illustration I want framed, and more. The rec of the week was rain boots (or shoes you can wear in the rain).
I hope you have a nice Sunday, all things considered,
Haley