Taking a ‘selfie’ is so popular now that it is hardly
interesting any more, and those seeking novelty are reduced to finding really
weird things to include in the picture or positions to get themselves into.
Even our president has gotten in on the act. And I understand that it has
reached almost epidemic proportions in teens and pre-teens.
Personally, I thought I would never on this green earth take
a selfie. But then my favorite dog got in my lap one day (Well, half of her got
in my lap. She’s a big dog) and I found myself seeing how this selfie thing
worked. It’s only a matter of time before every single person who owns a phone
capable of taking pictures will succumb to the desire to see how it works.
I suppose most selfies will be shared by email and the likes
of FaceBook, if they’re shared at all. There will be few that will be printed
out on paper and even fewer worthy of being printed.
We get to thinking that we’ve invented something new.
Selfies are new, aren’t they?
No, they’re really not. Before the advent of the cell phone
and digital photography, people were snapping pictures of themselves. It wasn’t
as easy though. They had to set up the camera somehow and set a timer and run
around in front of the lens and hope the camera caught them when they looked
their best.
Before cameras, there weren’t any selfies. Right?
Wrong again.
Artists in bygone times were often hard up to find subjects
who would sit still long enough for a portrait. So they propped up a mirror and
painted their own images. Slo-mo selfies. Some artists were so good and so
famous that we can see their efforts in art museums and in books of art. Before
the end of the 15th century, self portraits were rare, but beginning
in about 1490 artists of the caliber of Raphael, Giorgione and Durer used
themselves as models. Michelangelo made his first selfie as a cartoon
protesting the working conditions in the Sistine Chapel. One of every five of
Rembrandt’s paintings is a self-portrait.
Titian was the first to dare to paint himself as the old man
he was. And young people today taking selfies of themselves making ugly faces
or doing gross things are hard-pressed to equal Franz Xaver Messerschmidt who
created a series of 69 busts of himself showing grimaces including one of him
vomiting. Sold to a collector after his death, many of the busts were used in a
‘freak show.’ Messerschmidt is given credit to being a pre-curser of
Expressionism.
Everyone who has taken Art Appreciation has seen van Gogh’s
selfies. He painted more than 30 or them.
So selfies aren’t new, and we can only wonder what will come
next in ‘self-expression.’
Source: Book review in the June 30 issue of the Weekly
Standard by Henrik Bering of The Self Portrait: a Cultural History by James Hall.
