Let Me Take a Selfie

We dignify what we photograph, so why are we shamed for imaging ourselves?

Photo Credit: Drew Douglas

PART I: CELLULOID GODS

'I sometimes think the day will come when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been someone who lived as a human being and about whom much will have been written in the popular press: images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of any individual painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica cloth, but fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god'.

—The Goncourt Journals, November 1861.

We idolise images, their creation and consumption. We worship human faces, many of them photographic, all of them composed, constructed, curated. Honest or ersatz, we have become adept at parsing and appraising their countless configurations. We are, as Robert A. Sobieszek notes in his forward to Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, ‘consistently and addictively bent on studying facial representations and trying to discern what lies behind them.’

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