The Selfie: A Reinvention of Identity in Visual Self-Depiction

by Fatiha Kamal

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I had always thought of myself as a good writer; however, I also had very little direction on how to write a proper, well-structured essay that was also engaging. My essays from high school were formulaic, the standard five-paragraph format divorced from my own voice and creativity. Editing and revision were always performed to check spelling and grammar. In short, my view of the essay form was an incredibly narrow one.

When I began at NYU Tandon in Fall 2019, the freshman expository writing course was something of a relief in the STEM-heavy schedule for the semester. However, it was also one of the most disorienting academic experiences I had up until then. During that first semester, I was completely forced out of my shell when it came to writing. I had to learn to stop censoring my voice, no longer putting every idea through a sterilizing filter to try and please whomever it was that was reading my paper. I had to be okay with completely scrapping everything for an essay over halfway through the progression to write something that turned out to be a far better body of work. I had to learn how it felt to subject fifteen other people at the unholy hour of 9 a.m. to eleven pages of a rambling essay so they could throw every one of their critiques at me in real time, because it was important for me to learn and to improve, not only in technical ability but also in terms of my confidence. 

When I began working on my final essay for the second semester course, the one about an innovation of my choice, I had begun my essay proposal to my professor with an in-depth discussion about Kim Kardashian West. If I had been asked nine months prior to write the same essay, the idea of doing this would not have even popped into my mind, or at least, if it had, I wouldn’t have actually written an entire page and a half trying to connect Kim Kardashian to an eighteenth century French art theorist. To create this essay, it took a constant and unending cycle of emails to my professor asking for feedback, multiple incongruous google docs with ideas and half-drafts that I have since lost track of, hours of rewriting and revising in response to my peers’ suggestions, and most importantly, an unquestioned confidence in my choices and my ability as a writer. 

—Fatiha Kamal


One of the earliest, best-known examples of a self-portrait is Jan Van Eyck’s 1433 Portrait of a Man. The painting—showing the subject, against a black background, staring uncompromisingly at the viewer and wearing a red chaperon and a dark coat—has dubious status as a self-portrait, specifically. Much of the evidence in support of Van Eyck as the subject comes from the unique inscription on the painting’s frame, “As I can.” According to art historians Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, this is the first half of a phrase used by scribes at the end of a copied manuscript. The phrase typically ends with, “not as I would.” Van Eyck, however, omitted this second half, hinting that his intentions were not to please a commissioning patron, but rather to depict himself in his purest form to a willing viewer (Zucker and Harris 00:00:48-00:01:08). 

The artform of the self-portrait flourished in the Renaissance, with many artists applying the pre-existing practice of romanticizing the human form to their own likenesses. Later, self-portraiture would incorporate different styles of painting; Impressionists, Expressionists, and Pop artists, for example, experimented with more abstract forms and expressive color palettes that deviated from the norms of image depiction. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century marked a new turning point in self-portraiture, with the practice of self-depiction evolving to fit a brand-new medium that transcended the need for paint on canvas. In 1839, Robert Cornelius would take the first technologically produced self-portrait with a daguerreotype, an early model of a camera. In the image, Cornelius stands against a neutral background, wearing a sleek black jacket with his arms crossed over his chest. Although Cornelius is positioned off-center in the picture, his stare towards the camera—and the viewer—is as unflinchingly direct, similar to Van Eyck’s in his self-portrait (Carbon 4). While Cornelius’s image marked a new stage in the self-portrait’s evolution, it also marked the beginnings of the self-portrait’s digital successor: the selfie. 

A twenty-first century selfie as defined by the Oxford Dictionary is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, esp. one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). The first documented use of the word was in 2002 on an online chat forum, where a drunk Australian man had added the English diminutive “-ie” to a shortened version of “self-photograph” for a picture’s caption (Brumfield). Compared to the self-portrait, the selfie’s name is not the only thing that’s been significantly shortened. Post-Robert Cornelius, early self-portraiture technology underwent numerous changes that significantly reduced image production time. In the late nineteenth century, stereoscopic cameras would use photographic emulations that were more light-sensitive, thus allowing the image taken to be produced faster than had been possible with daguerreotypes. CMOS active pixel sensor technology, developed in the late twentieth century, was instrumental in transferring the photographic self-portrait to a digital self-portrait: in the 1990s, displays appeared on digital cameras that allowed captured images to be viewed instantly, while in the twenty-first century, front-facing cameras on cellphones and smartphones made reliable selfie composition possible (Carbon 4). 

The quick-to-produce nature of a selfie is at once a limiting and  liberating factor. With a traditional self-portrait, the painter is able to do as they please, working with a blank canvas, choosing whatever colors and backgrounds they wish, in some cases completely deconstructing the structure of their face for artistic effect. However, the pre-planning, manual labor, and skill required make this kind of self-portrait unattainable for most. A smartphone can produce an image essentially instantaneously, allowing for a massive quantity of selfies to be taken in an incredibly short amount of time, by anyone. Additionally, where traditional self-portraits vary in composition depending on the period and movement (abstract, realistic, surreal), selfies often only vary in terms of the environment in which the subject is placed: before a mirror, posing with food, with friends, etc. Filters, which often come built-in with a smartphone or as a feature on  a social media app, can digitally alter the image in minor ways by shifting the colors and tone or in more extreme ways, such as altering the shape of the subject’s eyes and face or even  placing floppy dog ears on their head . However, even with various photo retouching apps, the subject is still limited by their immediate environment and the predetermined features of image distortion applications to provide more depth and character to the image. Essentially, where a self-portrait is limited by its quantity of production, a selfie appears to be limited in its quality of production. This idea raises the following questions: is the selfie more than a technological innovation in self-depiction? Has the trade-off of quality for quantity led to an entirely new perspective on the practice of self-depiction that is unique to the twenty-first century?

Before understanding the purpose behind self-depiction as it pertains to selfies, it is necessary to first investigate the purpose of self-depiction as it pertains to the original self-portrait. Eighteenth-century art theorist Roger de Piles was instrumental in helping to develop a contemporary understanding of painting, and many of his arguments still resonate with modern art concepts. Writing to an amateur audience, de Piles focuses on portraits in his work The Principles of Painting to demonstrate how technical skill is only a fraction of what makes an accomplished work of art. De Piles argues that through a careful understanding of how the choices in lighting, color, and scenery affect the mood of the painting, the artist will be able to control the “attitude,” or pose, of the figure and have control over a “graceful expression of the vices as well as of the virtues” of the subject (de Piles 62). It is not enough for de Piles that a portrait artist create an accurate physical representation of the subject; they must also be able to assign an identity to the character in the portrait. The viewer must be able to access, through the artist’s instruction, the subject’s greater qualities (their “virtues”) and their worse qualities (their “vices”) and be able to relate to them in some way (62). The connection the artist fosters with the viewer through the medium of the painting is, for de Piles, the heart of portraiture; it gives purpose to the piece’s existence. When it comes to depicting oneself, this task of representing what de Piles might call “knowledge of character” must be accomplished far more carefully (62). A sufficient reflection of a self-portrait’s subject requires an examination of oneself in order to effectively create a visually-based dialogue with the viewer.