A selfie is a photo or a piece of art, like a painting, a drawing or a model, of your face and or body. It was evolved from the internet, social media and technology. A lot of selfies are copied or borrowed from old renaissance art, and older self portraits. Most types of selfies are trends, and people are really hiding their true selves by stealing other peoples work. Selfie is short for 'self portrait' and it was started on social media when a celebrity commented on their own photo '#Selfie'. This celebrity then started a trend for their fans, or supporters and the word blew up.
A lot of artists take selfies, or self portraits, because it shows their emotions and feelings. It also captures a moment of their lives in which they could look back on and remember that specific captured moment. However, people cover themselves with makeup and nice clothes to look good for the cameras and the audience looking at the photograph. This may be because they are insecure with how they look, and so they want to look better than they think they look so people don't make fun of them.
When cameras were first invented, a lot of artists used them to express their creativity, while a lot used them for family members and newer generations to remember them when they die, so they know what they looked like, what they seemed like and maybe a bit about their background, whether they were happy in life, or married, or had kids, or had a job, e.t.c.
A FEW QUESTIONS... How many selfies do you take a week? -I usually don't take too many selfies, but a week I would say that I take about 2-4 What do you do with them? -If I like how the selfie looks, I will post it/them on Instagram, but if I don't, I will just delete them. Why has taking selfies become so popular? -I think that the reason why selfies have become so popular is because there are so many different kinds of selfies, and they're quite unique.
THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF SELFIES ARE: -OOTD (Outfit Of The Day) -Group selfies -Themselves and food -Obscured selfies
Research on Selfies
What exactly is the definition of a selfie? Selfie is a slang word for self-portrait, which is stereo typically imagined as a photo of yourself taken on a phone or electronic device and shared to any social media, but most commonly Instagram. There are many different kinds of selfies, including;
The Mirror (or Reflected) Selfie- a self portrait in which the artist is taking a photograph of themselves in a mirror, or a reflected object. Artists like Vivian Maier, Ilse Bing and Ralph Eugene Meatyard have taken self portraits using mirrors and guitars to show their creativity by using objects you may not expect to be used in selfies and also different angles
The Disguised Selfie- a self portrait in which the artist is using makeup, clothing and facial expressions to disguise themselves, and to create a character. Artist Andy Warhol has taken many self portraits using the drag culture to disguise his face and turn into the opposite gender, and artist Gillian Wearing took a self portrait of her as a different person holding a mask of herself away from her face, and was inspired and interested by the Andy Warhol drag selfies
The Obscured Selfie- a self portrait in which the subject or main person's face is deformed or abstract. It could either be photographed that way or simply edited. Some examples of this style of selfie are Yayoi Kusama's self portrait of them holding badges over their eyes to possibly hide their face or eyes and also William Gedney's self portrait with head obscured. The photo is of his whole body but his head is cut off by the wall.
The Photobooth Selfie- a self portrait in which there are multiple selfies on one photo. This could maybe show diversity between many different photographs and each photo could have a different style or colour. Some examples of Photoboth Selfies are Andy Warhol's photobooth, in which every photo is a different colour and pose. Also, Tomoko Sawada's photobooth, where in every 4 pictures her hair changes styles and length.
Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier was an American photographer, born in 1926, who was very unique and unlike any other famous photographers. She was a nanny in her normal everyday life, and in her spare time she would take photos with her black and white camera. She had a very good eye for photos and all of her photos are very professional looking. She takes many different types of photographs, like selfies, reflected selfies and shadow selfies. She also takes portraits of other people and photos of land and background.She was quite a secretive person and didn't show people her photos. However, she became famous after her death because people bought her photos at auctions and turned them into positives. I like her photos because the style of them are different to a lot of photographers nowadays. She had died in 2009, just a few years before she was discovered and her art and photography changed her life.
Ilse Bing
Ilse Bing was a German photographer, born in 1899, who took photos using the Voigtlander camera she bought for herself in 1928, which she would use to teach herself photography. After she had that camera for a few years, she bought another camera which she used for her famous photos. Her genre of photographs varied a lot, she would take photos like self portraits, to portraits to shadow selfies to mirror selfies, etc. There were very few photographers like Ilse Bing, which made her so unique and her photos stand out from generic photographs. Her photos were very decisive and they were not posed, which is one of the main features you will notice about her photography.
Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, is an American photographer and artist, and his whole life was evolved around photography and art and creativity. In my opinion, Lee Friedlander's photographs are very abnormal and unique, and a lot of photos were taken in a decisive moment. A lot of his photography was on the street, taking photos of children playing or in the reflection of a shop window. His images are very clear and angled right, which is one of many reasons why they all look so eyecatching. Some of his photographs were introduced to places like the MoMA, an art gallery in America, and the Tate, an art gallery in England.
Selfies
These are the photos that me and my partner took on over the past 3 lessons. A lot of the photos were unsuccessful, they were either out of focus, blurry or over and under exposed. The way we could improve this is by editing them, and adding and cutting things out of them. I think I could put a filter and mess around with the brightness levels on photoshop and other editing apps like picsart and pixlr. I am very proud of my images, though, and in my opinion they look high quality.
I think that this is my worst image:
I don't like this image because it is too over exposed, and I did not take the photo myself, which means it isn't a selfie. Also, I don't like the way I look in this image.
This is my favourite image because the colours around the mirror match together, making nothing clash or look out of place or weird. You also can't see my face, which makes the photograph a disguised selfie.
I edited these three photos using the wrong photos I took during our last lesson on photoshop, using darker photos we took, selfies we took and portraits other people took of me, which weren't really selfies. I messed around with the colour balance of each picture, the exposures and the colour mixer which turned each photograph a colour and when I turned down the opacity on some pictures, the colours changed and mixed together to make more colours. For example, the third image I edited the colours, and when I deleted some pictures, or improved the photo more, some parts changed colours, like the camera outline turned red while the rest of the image was a green/blue colour.
The second image is my favourite because the colours are perfectly balanced, so it looks natural and not too bright. I think that my photoshop edits were very successful and I am happy with how they turned out. In my opinion, the third image is too messy and bright, whilst the other two are quite subtle and the colours are more muted. If I were to do this again, I would probably run with a theme of the other two edits I made, and make them all red and white.
Obscured Selfie
Our task was to go out and take obscured selfies, each with different themes.
We used stickers, paint, windows, mirrors, caution tape, tracing paper and acetate to make our obscured selfies. Before we went to take our photos, I looked at the artist Delaney Allen's hidden self portrait which inspired the image of red paint on a piece of acetate over my face, which hides over half of my face. In a way, I changed the image by using colour, while his is in black and white. I think I would improve my work by maybe experimenting with more things and use different objects to hide or distort my face. I think I would use a bottle, like a perfume bottle, and place it over the camera lens which stretches out my face.
Book Designs + Research
We have to make final pieces for our selfie project, and I want to have a Japanese bound book, with red thread. Each book has to have 12 selfies in it, and I have chosen the selfies I want to put in my book.
Here are some examples of what I want my book to look like:
I want to create my own book, using black A4 paper on both sides, with 10 sheets of white A4 paper in between and sew on the spine of the book so it looks like the images above. I also want to make it like the third image, a hole cut out in the centre with a bit of acetate on top of it. I am very excited to see how my book turns out.
Chosen Selfies
There are a range of types of selfies, like scanner selfies, obscured selfies, mirror selfies, etc. I like all of the images I have chosen, however I think the challenge of making my book would be keeping all of the images the same size or proportion. I took them with different angles, like portrait and landscape, so they may all be different sizes and look weird or throw the person who is looking at my book off a bit. I may change this by either printing them to size or cutting them to size when they come out the printer. I could also edit them all in photoshop by cropping them, but this may cut off some parts of the image I like.