Selena-selfie

     As far as I’m concerned, the value of selfie is hard to define. Since the social media has grown and technologies become better and better, selfies are everywhere. Therefore, I’m curious about what a good selfie is and how to critique a selfie when most of them look very similar. The problem is, if selfies just show the subject, what’s the difference between all of them? Moreover, how can we critique or make some recommendations?

     Obviously, selfies are usually full of symbols of narcissism. However, I insist there might be some interesting issues through the discussion in our class. One of my classmates, Tais, reckoned that a selfie could say some fun story if the photographer notices the angle, structure, background, and so on. I believe she got the point! Even though the distances between subject and lens are limited by the lengths of your arm, a selfie still can be an artistic picture if we put a creative idea into it. Then of course, we could show more meanings in the selfie than just showing how beautiful/handsome we are.

     In my selfies, I pretended I had my picture taken by someone else in the pictures and I refused to face the lens. What I wanted to confirm in this series was the personal privacy and freedom of photography, and the confusion of the subject's pose. Actually, you can easily find those kinds of pictures on the internet though their intention might be totally different than mine; it seems to me that people just want to show how good they are. What’s the most interesting thing to me is that sometimes you can see a mirror or some reflections that show they’re taking the photo by themselves (even though they want people to think someone else is taking it). When I took the picture, I was really careful because I didn’t want to make those funny mistakes like they did.