Selfie culture? Researching Identity through self-portraiture.

In the 1990s I earned a living as a subject in front of the camera. Years later, I radically

shifted this orientation: I became the author of my own representation, gradually creating an

extensive body of self-portraits. I have been doing this kind of work ever since, questioning

always the position of the subject-woman with respect to the camera lens.

When I first began my work as a photographer, I drew inspiration from the work of Claude

Cahun and Cindy Sherman among others, and I felt myself in good hands in this rather

exclusive club of self-portraiture artists. Who could have imagined that 15 years later,

“selfie” would become the word of the year in 2013 and that what seems like everyone in the

world would be snapping away with a built-in camera-telephone turned around and aimed at

themselves?

How the “self” actually figures in our increasingly “selfie culture” and what we as artists choose to put

in our frames? Is there a difference of how do we present ourselves on social media and in art

galleries? What does “perfection” mean? I ask about the distinction between art photography and

contemporary selfies? In so doing, I evoke the explosive combination of anxiousness and celebration

that comes from daring to realise abstract ideas with one’s own body, during the performance of the

absolutely singular mixture of numbness and physical pain produced by the photo shoot as an

experience of the process of creating art. What, if any, continuum can we draw between the image

produced by that intense experience and the quick image produced by an I-Phone X and available filter

work?

Susanne Junker