Thursday 12 December 2013

STATEMENT

Selfie: a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website
occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself every day isn’t necessary

Origin: early 21st Century: from SELF + -IE’
Oxford Dictionary

A large number of disposable cameras were purchased and handed out to a large number of people, asking only one thing: to take a ‘selfie’. This project is the result of this.

Taking someone else’s self-portrait and putting it amongst a large number of other self-portraits, at first can seem very strange, overwhelming in fact.  Through looking at these images in this way allows the viewer to look at the images very differently. A ‘selfie’ is something you may just scroll past on a social media site, possibly making a passing comment, but this project makes you take notice of them, and almost forces you to do so. You don’t necessarily notice the details within every image due to the sheer amount of them but the more time you do spend looking at them, the more you will notice. There are more and more things you will see every time you look back.


Seeing them all together makes you feel intrusive. As though you are looking into this moment of these people’s lives and it almost doesn’t feel okay. They have taken the picture themselves for everyone to see but through the way it has been shown here, it puts it in a different context. It’s not on that social media site any more, we don’t know anything about these people which essentially can allow you to come up with your own back stories behind these people. You decide who they are and what they’re all about through that single image. It’s up to you. 

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