Selfies
The human obsession capturing the “self” goes back thousands of years. Egyptian pharoahs were buried with hieroglyphs and inscriptions capturing their life events on their sarcophagus. The Greeks and Romans created lifelike sculptures of gods and legends but also of themselves. Artists painted portraits, photographers took portraits, and when we all had a camera in our pockets, we turned it on ourselves. There is a noticeable shift in human history of when we began this fixation with the self. The Lascaux cave paintings in France, considered to be the earliest forms of art created by humans some 17,000 years ago, don’t feature any humans. They show animals, vegetation, landscapes, and even abstract art. A leading theory for why our ancestors didn’t paint themselves is that they didn’t live in a human-dominated world, so they didn’t consider themselves to be important. They marveled instead at the world they found themselves in, trying to capture and preserve the beauty of the natural world by etching it on cave walls. A few thousand years later, humans quickly became the dominant species on the planet, and so began the unquenchable dream to preserve ourselves for all of eternity by sculpting, painting, and photographing ourselves.
Throughout the past millenium, royal families, warlords, and the aristocracy often commissioned what would today be considered comically large paintings of themselves to capture their “likeness” on canvas. They clearly perceived themselves important enough to be imprinted and framed in gold on some unassuming wall in a great hall that would have the unfortunate duty of bearing its load for decades. A painting of a person was, in their minds, an artifact cementing that person’s permanence on Earth. It was their way of proclaiming “I was here and I was important” through an artist’s rendition of what they looked like as they posed for hours with the hope that their legacy lived on for years in the form of the painting, a twisted loophole in the death contract that promised to one day erase their existence from the world.
The arrival of daguerrotypes as a primitive form of modern photography didn’t change this human behavior much. In fact, it made it more accessible. The first immigrants that fueled America’s westward expansion captured lots of family photographs, likely in an aspirational grasp to claim their name as one of the great dynasties with a storied history that would live on for centuries. It wasn’t uncommon to see sepia-toned photographs of some family called “The Sicklers” or “The Watsons” who stared the camera dead-on without so much a smile, portraying pride and confidence as they displayed their venison, veal, and other assorted meats on a table to show how well off they were. Maybe the photographs were just for their future descendants, or maybe they were to be sent to far-off relatives to gloat about how successful they were. My parents don’t have a lot in common with The Merryweathers from the 1800s, save for the bi-annual ritual where our entire family went to pose together at a photo studio. I never quite understood it. I’d always ask, “We’re all here at home, why can’t we just take a picture now with our camera?,” to which I’d get some rehearsed response about how we’d look better and the picture would be of higher quality. And then we framed it and put it up on the walls, just like the monarchs of old did with their paintings.
While the human desire to capture the self has remained steady, technology has evolved to meet this need in fascinating ways. High-powered DSLRs with incredibly expensive internal optics allowed us to capture sunrises, landscapes, wildlife, and close-ups of flowers in astonishing detail with never-before-seen control over the lighting, focal points, and color. The high cost of these devices and the steep learning curve proved to be a strong enough of a barrier to entry that these cameras never quite achieved the widespread dominance that such groundbreaking technology perhaps ought to have, so they remained in the hands of professionals, hobbyists, and midlife-crisis dads on vacation for the entire time that they were available. It wasn’t until digital cameras and more recently smartphone cameras that humans became preoccupied yet again with the idea of preserving themselves. At every tourist attraction, every night out with friends, every family vacation, and every donning of a new outfit, you’ll find humans pointing cameras at themselves, semi-religiously gathering evidence of the fact the event actually took place so that they can pull up the picture on their phones in the off chance that someone doesn’t believe them when they mention it in passing during a casual conversation.
As digital cameras were becoming more affordable, people hacked around existing features to serve this deep-seated desire for capturing the self instead of using the the features for what they were originally designed for. The self-timer on digital cameras that would count down a few seconds before taking the shot was originally made to reduce or eliminate vibrations induced by manually pressing in the shutter, as this risks shaking the camera and introducing blurred artifacts in the shot. But of course, humans used it for selfies where they’d mount the camera on a tripod, frame the shot, turn on the self-timer, and then run into the shot with a sudden smile before the timer ran out and the camera took the shot. As we all know, everyone’s fondest memories of road trips in the late nineties are undoubtedly the ones where their dads perch their digital Nikon camera on some precariously unstable rock and set the self-timer for what feels like an ungodly high amount of time, forcing everyone to hold their vain smiles for way longer than necessary until the shutter finally clicks a few decades later.
The front-facing camera on smartphones originally existed to enhance video calls for business meetings. In 2003, Sony introduced the Ericsson Z100, the first mobile device with a front-facing camera, with the intent of allowing face-to-face video calls and to bring some humanity into virtual meetings. As they became more ubiquitous across smartphones, consumers did what they’ve always done — used it to capture pictures of themselves. Despite most phones coming installed with it, the front-facing camera still played the role of younger sibling to the almighty rear-facing camera. The camera on the back of the phone was always more powerful, boasted more megapixels, had better image resolution, and often had a much farther optical zoom. Manufacturers naturally assumed that cameras would be used to point at things externally to capture objects in the environment and landscapes, as you would with a traditional camera. But of course, people did the opposite. Social media really accelerated the adoption of the front-facing camera, offering all kinds of filters and effects that quickly gluttonized the act of self-admiration starving deep inside all of us. Today, it’s second nature to pick up the phone, record your reaction to the latest world crisis, and broadcast it to the world in a matter of seconds. The demand for an even better, hands-free front-facing camera is ramping up, and it’s going to be interesting to see what type of capitalist dystopia awaits us in the next evolution of this technology.
The selfie stick was an interesting third-party response to humans mostly taking pictures of themselves with the front-facing camera. It was in many ways a physical workaround to the absence of a wide-angle option in the front facing camera, awkwardly extending the distance between subject and camera with an extendable plastic rod. More importantly, it proved to be popular enough to overcome the social stigma of using one in public. Optics hadn’t advanced enough yet to pack an unconscionably high number of lenses inside the front of a camera to offer a wide-angle option, so selfie sticks were an interim cheap, low-cost solution to the evergreen human problem of wanting to capture the self in the most appealing form. As a secondary benefit, it likely also alleviated other social discomfort involved with handing your phone to strangers in foreign locations and risking them running away with it, or just avoiding the plain awkwardness of asking someone else to take your picture with your phone and being obliged to offer the same service for them in return.
The early internet chimed in with its contribution to selfies too. Cultural norms on the first social platforms like MySpace necessitated that users frequently replace their profile picture with more up-to-date versions showing off their latest dives and haunts. This in turn, meant taking more selfies at interesting angles with unique backdrops and novel effects. Every other week or month, early millenials would take a break from dealing with CSS bugs that no doubt were a result of tile-animating a massive GIF background on their MySpace profile and instead tackle something they knew they could accomplish in a few minutes — change their profile picture. Your choice of picture, your expression, the lighting, the clothing you were wearing, and how you worked your picture in with the rest of aesthetic of your profile page was of utmost importance. It was the online version of being presentable, and much of the early internet had a cult following of people carefully curating their web personas.
Today, choosing the selfies you display on your dating profile is a sacred act involving a lot of trial-and-error. You have to choose the right “hero” image, one that’s begging to be swiped-right on along with several follow-up images on your profile to keep your potential match curious and interested in you as a person. Many rely on their close circle of friends to pick the most appealing pictures of them to post on their profiles, having all but given up on their own ability to make unbiased judgements about their own appearance in a frenzied and highly competitive online dating world filled with hits and misses. This whole dance of testing new selfies as profile images on a Tinder or Hinge plays out like a malformed mating ritual for modern homo sapiens, with gentle thumb swipes on small rectangular capacitive touchscreens dictating who we choose to meet, reject, and in the best cases, spend the rest of our lives with.
Well before the invention of photography, the artists skilled enough to be painting others often also painted themselves in self-portraits, painstakingly rendering every wrinkle and wince with just the right hue of pigment, and they kept at it for hours or days on end. If today’s generation had to hold a phone up for a mere five extra seconds for the picture to process, the number of total selfies taken would instantly bottom out. It leaves us questioning if the artists of old would scoff at today’s youth snapping away dozens of “self-portraits” in less than a second, with every image exactly mimicking reality without any recognizable painterly resemblance to art or artist. People alive today are more aware of their own appearance than any others in the past, with hundreds of selfies available on their phones for them to look back upon and admire. The devil lies on the extremes here, with low self-esteem on one end and intolerable narcissism on the other.
The human discovery of self-awareness is heavily credited as a catalyst for us as a species developing a consciousness. The story goes that man gazed upon a reflection in water, and was made aware of his own existence, making a connection in the brain so sacred that we leapfrogged every other species and bravely set off on the irreversible path to self-actualization. When these early ancestors looked at a reflection of themselves in a lake for the first time, I wonder if they thought “I need to save this image for all of eternity.” Perhaps one of them envisioned a future where they would gather around a pond of still water and gaze upon their reflections until the winter winds froze their likeness into the lake, preserving their appearance in some pseudo-historic form of an icy daguerrotype that patiently waited to be discovered, a selfie time capsule hidden in plain sight.
A mirror reflection of yourself is real-time in that it instantly shows you the slow, almost imperceptible changes in nuanced expressions and emotions, unlike a selfie. A picture of yourself online is static, without the layer of time to imbue it with much needed context. You could be feeling down and hopeless on a given day and your Slack profile picture is still beaming with joy. You could be stressed and burned out when applying for jobs but your LinkedIn profile picture conveys calm and professionalism in exactly the ways that you’re not in that moment. “Live Photos” that capture a couple of seconds before and after the shot have tried to infuse the axis of time into static pictures with varying degrees of success, making for some absurd clips where the subjects change expression and mood very suddenly, clearly unaware that the photograph captures frames before and after the static shot.
We’ve been obsessed with capturing ourselves in one form or another ever since we achieved dominance as a species. Is this a direct evolutionary response to our inability to hold long-term memories in our minds, or is it something else? Looking at old photos of ourselves can stir up mixed emotions and feelings at very uncalled for times. If you happen to be opening your fridge and see a picture of yourself from a decade ago held up by a rusted fridge magnet, it’s beckoning you to stop and ponder the change in your life since then. A moment of unplanned, spontaneous contemplation that shimmied its way in the middle of your day, a warrantless interruption in your quest for orange juice. A photograph “freezes” a moment in time for you to look at much later. It’s almost like a magic trick, us upending the laws of space-time to give the universe the middle finger every time we snap a picture. We’re the only species that has this superpower to stop time and analyze the details, allowing us to mentally replay the actual moment where it happened.
When you look at a picture of your younger self, your mind will inevitably invite free-flowing thoughts about time and life, like “Wow, at that time, I was worried about my grades” or “I had no idea on that first trip here that I’d one day call this place home” or “To think that I was so committed to spending the rest of my life with that person”. The actual photo quality doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter if it was shot on a low-cost Polaroid or an expensive DSLR or if it’s a painting that you commissioned someone to make. You gazing upon your past self and mentally crossing the bridge of time is a uniquely anthropocene experience. It’s a form of time travel that includes one-way communication with your past self. And yet, even with this knowledge, we rarely think how our future selves will perceive a selfie we’re taking today. We wait in queues at popular spots to properly frame a shot, crack that quintessential smile, and hit the shutter multiple times just in case we blinked or in the rare chance that a bird photobombed the shot for a split second. We don’t have the knowledge of how our future selves will look back on the picture. Will it be with sadness, looking back at a then-distant life that they don’t have anymore? Or will it be with wisdom, thinking back at the naivety of their younger selves? We can’t know, so the best we can do is capture the shot and hope for the best.