Seeing the Self: How Selfies Alter our Relationship with the Self and the Image

This essay illustrates how selfies, as both a technological innovation and an everyday photographic practice, challenge several pictorial conventions—both aesthetically and technologically. The essay offers a theoretical analysis of how selfies, as post-photographic objects, unsettle these premises and overturn representational frameworks in image-making that had been taken for granted since the medium’s inception. It further argues that selfies, as relatively new techno-visual objects, disrupt established visual norms, generate new socio-visual expectations and give rise to a distinct visual vocabulary. Networked publics have transformed how images are produced, consumed and circulated across space and time. The dissemination of image-making practices and the democratisation of the medium have altered the material form, meaning, manipulation, ownership, exchange, flow and accumulation of images. This shift has reshaped attitudes towards personal image-making and influenced how everyday life is viewed, revisited and visually expressed. The simultaneous convergence of posing, performing, composing, shooting and viewing constitutes the visual content of any selfie—making it a unique visual object. In this framework, the image-maker, the image and the referent—as well as the viewer, the act of viewing and the viewed—collapse into one. In a selfie, the photographer becomes the photograph, and the live (re)view of the self becomes the image itself, as will be argued.