Selfies

I take a lot of photos of myself, many more than most people of my generation I suspect. Indeed I have hardly ever seen a 'selfie' (as nowadays understood) in anybody's photo collection if they were born before, say, 1970. Generally the older you are, the less likely you are (a) to have ever taken a selfie, and (b) do it repeatedly as a regular habit. So I'm out of step with many of my contemporaries. I feel convinced that 'older people' as a body think that taking a picture of oneself is daft and worthy of scorn. My parents would have laughed heartily at the idea, assuming that it ever occurred to them to try. It just wasn't the thing to do in their day: it smacked of obsessive self-love, with a whiff of oddness about it, even perversion. Yes (Mum or Dad would say), artists painted self-portraits - and what a strange bunch they were! - and serious photographers (not you, Lucy) did occasionally make arty black-and-white studies of themselves. But proper portraits weren't self-taken: you went to a studio for a professional to do it; or if doing it on the cheap, sat in a photo booth. And you did it at annual intervals at most, when growing up. Or to mark important life events when still in one's prime - never in decline, in wrinkled old age, when no longer handsome or beautiful. 

Were they still alive, my parents would be both puzzled and rather worried by my very large collection of selfies, all dated and captioned and neatly stored in annual folders, with copies of many of them on my phone. And remember I shun social media. These are not for self-promotion. I have no Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or WhatsApp account, and don't share my pictures on those platforms. I'm not involved in influencing. True, you can find a selection of my selfies on Flickr, but they are there so that people I've lost touch with can still see I'm alive and well, though gradually withering. And they are honest representations of myself, not touched up to make me look wonderful.

But the question remains: why do I take selfies in such profusion? Why does anybody do it?  

The self-image is everywhere nowadays. I've read various articles on why this should be so. I'm not sure I buy into deep and complex psychological theories, although selfies must meet some mental need. The most obvious reasons for 'taking a selfie' surely include showing that 'the photographer was there', and reveal 'what the photographer was doing/experiencing/wearing/feeling'. Originally there were accusations of narcissism against anybody who took a picture of themselves, but I personally don't think this has ever been the main reason, although certainly there are those around who do preen themselves and like a record of how they look. No, I believe the rise of assertive individualism and self-promotion, and the decline of community spirit and self-effacement - a consequence of social changes - has made it respectable to self-record and publish the result. 

If, like me, you live alone and experience life mostly on your own, then the chief person in any people-pictures you take is inevitably going to be yourself. And there are advantages to making yourself the usual person who appears in your shots. You are at all times a willing and available subject; you can try out all kinds of photographic effects and poses to get the right shot; the process is never a bore; there's no reticence or embarrassment to overcome, as there would be if asking another person to take the picture, or to be the subject of it; there's nobody's permission to ask, nor fee to consider; and no social ethic or taboo or local custom to risk violating, as there might be if photographing someone else in an unfamiliar location. All you need is the right moment and a suitable camera. 

That mention of  'a suitable camera' is a key point. 'Selfies' (as nowadays understood) hardly existed before digital cameras became commonplace. Certainly there were plenty of 'self portraits', but these were generally set up with the camera resting on some steady surface, or fixed to a tripod, several feet away from the photographer, and the shutter fired either with a remote control gadget or by using the camera's self timer to take the picture after a few seconds' delay. The traditional way, indeed, to take a passport photo if you didn't go to a studio or sit inside a photo booth. It was rather hit-or-miss. Focussing a pre-digital camera required an eye at the viewfinder as you pressed the shutter button: impossible of course when seated several feet in front of the camera. The best you could do was to set the focus (manually) on an imaginary point in front of the chair-back, take a number of shots, and hope that at least one of them would be spot-on for sharp focus. It generally worked. But it used up film.

And that was another issue: the high cost of film in pre-digital days. Only professionals could afford to buy it in bulk and get a discount. Amateurs like myself, especially teenage amateurs who were still at school and did not have a salary, could not find the money for buying many rolls of film. It was hard to save up for film when one's only income was pocket money! I remember being overjoyed if Mum and Dad gave me two or three rolls of Kodachrome for my birthday, or at least the cash to buy it. Three 36-exposure rolls meant I could take 108 pictures. You used them sparingly, and didn't waste them on shooting oneself. 

Getting back to the camera, there was another physical limitation. Few cameras could focus close enough for shooting at arm's length. If you tried, the picture would always be out of focus - a frame wasted. So holding the camera in the modern selfie manner didn't work. The advent of autofocus for film cameras wasn't the game changer you might suppose. I doubt if many people realised that the need to look in the viewfinder as you released the shutter had vanished. Even when digital cameras were becoming established (from 2000) I never observed people taking selfies. 

But by 2010 it was no longer uncommon to see people with little digital cameras taking pictures of themselves. Even so, in 2013 I was still accosted by an elderly man at the South of England Show at Ardingly, when taking a selfie of myself with my little Leica D-Lux 4. He thought it a weird thing to do. He disapproved. I told him I simply wanted a picture of myself at the Show, to confirm I was there. He calmed down enough to take a goodish shot of me, when I passed him the camera. But I'm sure he still thought I was half-mad, or some kind of self-obsessed diva. 

Times have thankfully changed. In the last ten years selfies have become so unremarkable that not to take them at all, or to purse lips at people doing it, seems a bit odd and old-fashioned. The rise of the smartphone, the development of social media, and the ferocious self-consciousness of the youngest generations are surely the main reasons. So be it. One has to go with the flow. At least I can put myself in the picture without feeling reluctance or embarrassment, or provoking snarky comment. Nor should anyone else feel that way.

To end, I read recently about a survey that made a curious but perhaps unsurprising discovery: that people rated pictures of themselves very highly, but had no interest in other people's selfies. Hmm! Perhaps one should, after all, not be so free with publishing self-taken shots!