1.- Article ‘Universal Principles of Depicting Oneself across the Centuries: From Renaissance Self-Portraits to Selfie-Photographs’
Author Claus-Christian Carbon, Front. Psychol., 21 February 2017
This article is part of research topic ‘Understanding Selfie’
Reference: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00245/full
The article asks questions such us - What is the purpose of self-depiction, and What is the idea behind painting or photographing ourselves? and provides comparisons between types of painted self-portraits through history, right up to contemporary photographic selfies. Going from Albrecht Durer’s ‘self-portrait at 28’ painted in 1500 and Diego Velasquez‘ depiction of himself in ‘Las Meninas’, to the emotionally charged self-portraits by Van Gogh, Egon Shiele and Frida Khalo, the early photographs of Robert Cornelius who arguably took the first ever selfie in 1839, and on to the current era of smart-phone selfies
The article is mainly orientated towards the psychological reasons for depicting oneself in painting and photography, rather than questioning what can or cannot be considered art. It does however distinguish between self-photography and self-painting which it considers to be art, in contrast to the 21st century digital selfie.
The article concludes that: Although contemporary selfies are clearly produced with high frequency and often quite incidentally, they aim to provide similar messages as artistic self-portraiture has done for centuries and show similar types of expression, and reveal something about the creator in particular, and also people in general. People want to document their lives, their personality, their outward appearance, and sometimes also their current situation, mood, feelings or cognition, and this is also an expression of the social nature of the human being, of wishing others to share one's experiences and to empathize with these experiences.
I don’t altogether agree with these conclusions, the reasons artists do self-portraits varies enormously from person to person. They don’t ‘always want to document their lives, their personality, their outward appearance, or their current situation, sometimes artists do self-portraits simply because of the availability of the source, some get into the genre for commercial reasons and others for therapeutic reasons and so on, and my view on this is that artist used self-portraiture to project themselves as who they wanted to be, others as promotional material or to protest against convention or in search for identity - and others just to practice. The reasons may have been singular or combined but a common feature in all self-portraiture was freedom!
For me the importance of this research lies on the differentiation between photographic and painted self-portraiture as art, versus contemporary selfies which are not. And for me the main difference is in the process and motivation. A selfie is a photograph of yourself to document a moment in time in your life, normally spontaneous and intuitive, and therefore usually fairly disposable - something to put on your social media or keep in your electronic memorabilia box to one day bring out for nostalgia to refresh your memory.
A self-portrait on the other hand, whether by photography or painting, is an altogether more complicated production, involving composition and quite possibly sketches, a work meant to be viewed in a way that communicates something to the viewer with conscious or subconscious intention. Something intended to make the viewer respond emotionally in ways that no selfie intends, with a message that may vary according to the viewer, sometimes an explicit message, and sometimes something left for the interpretation to the viewer. I think the success of a work of art is substantially related level of response it elicits in the viewer.