The following text is by final year Photography BA(Hons) student 2014-15 Sophie Wells (graduated 2015) which was originally published in the 2015 degree show catalogue. You can find out more about Sophie on her website.
Sophie has chosen this work by Catherine Balet to accompany her piece.

Catharine Balet 'Strangers in the Light #71' (2009)

Catharine Balet ‘Strangers in the Light #71’ (2009)

The word ‘selfie’ has become a recent phenomena which, until a few years ago, was left within the obscurities of the internet. Today it is a fully established term, even included within the Oxford English Dictionary, defining it as a ‘photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website’. (Oxford, 2015) I feel that such a definition will not satisfy the postmodernist thinker and so I have conducted this short guide.

The mobile phone is the camera of choice for the instigator of the selfie. Its appeal being the ease to upload such photographs to social media: the outcome being a continuous increase to the abundance of images floating in cyberspace. Once uploaded onto the internet, the selfie may be reproduced and copied countless times and so becomes a simulacrum of the subject’s self. It is no longer a mere simulation because the likeness precedes even the essence of the subject.

Not only does the photographer perform the act of uploading but they become the uploaded as the subject not only becomes the object but also the instigator of the photograph. It is a self infliction which one could compare to suicide (the killer is also the killed). Yet with the selfie, the death of the individual gives way to the birth of the image. The subject of the selfie, either knowingly or not, allows their identity to be destroyed through the photograph. The photograph is limited to representation, it is incapable of holding the true nature of its subject and open to whichever interpretation the viewer places upon it. Neil Postman explained that, ‘unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea.’ (Postman, 1985, p. 73)

It is a realised and edited version of their self, as the selfie acts as an ideology in which the image replaces the dialectic symbol of their identity. A simulated representation is created of a higher and more enjoyable life. It is a performance, a tailored advertisement where both the subject and the photographer are the commodified product. Yet the act of taking a selfie is not necessarily a performance exclusively for others, it is just as much a performance of imagined enjoyment for their own ego. Todd McGowan writes, ‘the image allows subjects to imagine that they are complying with the command to enjoy.’ (McGowan, 2004, p. 59) The subject of the selfie is turned into nothing other than an image in which lies a fantasised identity. With the transformation into the image, the instigator is able to become the aforementioned symbol of enjoyment.

Through the loss of meaning initiated by the image, the selfie becomes a schizophrenic portrayal of the subject caused by the ‘breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning.’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 26) It is the loss of reality created when the relationship between the signifier (the form of the thing) and the signified (the concept of the thing) break down. The only meaning which may ever be applied to the subject of the selfie is through the form and not through the actual self.

The selfie is the postmodernist’s dream: it is a faultless model of the death of both the artist and the subject. The sign of the subject of the selfie is destroyed and replaced by the image, where identity withers away and any semiotic meaning is lost to schizophrenia.

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Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, London, Verso.

McGowan, T. (2004) The end of dissatisfaction : Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment, Albany, N.Y. ; [Great Britain], State University of New York Press.

Postman, N. (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death, London, Methuen.

‘Selfie.’ http://www.oxforddictionaries.com. 2015. Web. accessed 25 May 2015.

           http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/selfie.