Autoethnography in Word and Image: The Selfie Project
“You paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand, and you call the painting Vanity.” –John Berger, Ways of Seeing
In light of Ways of Seeing, how can we reinscribe power insofar as portraiture and self-identity? What exchange of power is enacted through self-representation? What are all the ways we evaluate ourselves and then send that self-evaluation out into the world for others to consume and reevaluate? What is the most honest form of self-representation—is it more word or image, or does it change depending on the person? Memoir, self portrait, 160-character Twitter bio, stereotypical selfie, those “About Me” pages we uploaded to this website at the beginning of the semester — what are the different ways we can represent ourselves, and in each medium what do we deem important or interesting about ourselves? How many different stories through different media can we each tell about ourselves?
Essentially, I’m interested in examining modern selfie culture as a microcosm of self-representation.
Executing this goal is twofold, I think: both analyzing the power that is catalyzed by taking your own photograph or telling your own story, and then actually trying to produce those different forms of self-expressive media to see what is the Truest form of self-representation (for me). I’m hoping that can serve as the critical and creative portions of this project: first examining the concept of self-representation in the modern age (I’m interested in looking at everyone’s Word Art bios as a case study), and then going ahead and representing myself in those myriad ways.
Preliminary Bibliography:
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Episode 2. BBC. 1972. Film.
Eakin, Paul John. “Self and Self-Representation Online and Off.” Frame 28.1, May 2015. 11-29. Web.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “But Enough About Me.” New Yorker, 25 Jan. 2010. Web.
Simmons, Rachel. “Selfies Are Good for Girls.” Slate. The Slate Group, 20 Nov. 2013. Web.
Syme, Rachel. “Selfie: The revolutionary potential of your own face, in seven chapters.” Matter. Medium, 19 Nov. 2015. Web.
Emily,
I love this idea and how you’ve related it to what we studied in class. I think selfies and selfie culture are incredibly interesting not just because of how they can portray the person who took them but also their surrounding environment. For instance, whenever a disaster happens – there was an example somewhere of a plane crash into some body of water – survivors may take selfies while in the moment. Thus, events begin to also be defined by the face also present – so the identity that person creates can really make a difference. I think it’d be cool too if you incorporated some idea of self-cultivation through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. With these sites, users can present themselves as they want the world to see them – not necessarily how they actually are. In this sense they are similarly taking control of their own portraits. I think you can do a lot with this! Great job!
I think it’s awesome that you can already do a little experiment with all of our bios to examine how people represent themselves! Cordelia’s comment about looking at social media sites could be another way to study this by comparing how the same individual presents themselves on different platforms and if they represent the same things.
Overall I love the idea of examining power and the manipulation of words and text in how we want to be identified!
I really like this idea. The main thought that I have is surrounding the painting tradition of the self portrait. I think that selfie culture may be unique from this, but I think it would be interesting to think about how the idea of depicting self is not isolated to their century. Look at Van Gogh and Rembrandt. It might be cool for the creative to have your final product be a selfie created by smaller selfies arranged to create your face. I think that would be a lot of work but also it would be amazing!
Hey Emily! This is a really neat idea! Adding onto Cordelia’s comment about looking closely at social media sites, I think it might be interesting if you considered how representing yourself in these different areas might change, especially based on a word/image relationship. Which photos forego facebook but make it onto twitter? How does our language and self expression change based on the type of audience we expect to encounter?
Looking forward to seeing how your project develops!
Emily,
I’m glad you took my suggestion to look at the “About Me” pages. I think that will be really cool, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
I think this project could also have a great self-reflection aspect to it where you look at several different ways you have present yourself in different contexts or at different times in your life to see what you value. I good example could be looking back at college app essays or old social media posts. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Andrew 😀
Hi Emily,
Clearly your idea is generating a lot of interest and engagement already! I just wanted to add that until your post I hadn’t thought about how things things like a twitter-bio could be considered like a “written selfie”. Another piece to consider exploring could be how people caption the image selfies that get posted to various websites (particularly Instagram and sometimes Facebook). This could give you the opportunity to examine the word-image relationship when they are engaging directly with each other.