Monday, May 2, 2022

The Looking Glass Self

Ever since the year the Daguerreotype was released to the public in 1839, photographers have been turning the camera upon themselves...

Robert Cornelius, Self-Portrait,
Daguerreotype, November or December 1839

Often these have became famous photographer's best-known works...

Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirror, 1931

Or even unknown photographers, later discovered after their deaths, most beloved works...

Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits Hardcover – Illustrated, October 29, 2013

Vivian Maier self-potrait circa 1950s

Artist Cindy Sherman is most well known for her Untitled Film Stills, an analog photography series from the 1980s in which Sherman herself uses elaborate make-up and costume to act out iconic female personas from film, television, and consumer culture of the mid–late 20^th century.

Cindy Sherman (B. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #21

Sherman began using Instagram in recent years as a means of circulating her elaborate, digitally manipulated self-portraits.

Cindy Sherman, Previously Unpublished

Artist Amalia Ulman, in response to the idea that social media is a way to sell one’s personal “brand”, staged a five month scripted performance inspired by “total makeover” culture. Her Instagram feed, evoking a consumerist fantasy lifestyle, was excessive yet believably familiar. Ulman went to great lengths to replicate the narrative conventions of similar lifestyle feeds. The idea was conceived of as a “boycott” of her own online persona. The project was meant to highlight a disconnect between our online personas and ourselves, to critique the ’exposure at any cost-culture’ encouraged by social media, while also implicating herself within that culture. Ulman admitted that while much of the new identity she created for “Excellences and Perfections” was fabricated, there was an element of truth to her personality revealed as a result.