Selfies are New, Right?

    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 15^th 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.