Haters heap scorn on the selfie, lamenting this ubiquitous start-up genre as quintessentially narcissistic. But where’s the fun in that? You have an immense capacity to love yourself. To be properly selfless, you have to be a little selfish. Shooting oneself, in any event is not entirely about turning inward. You have to create distance. You have to move the camera “over there”, and contrive a way to pull the shutter. And in this activity you’re never entirely alone. Even the most loathesome selfie (the triggering of a red light traffic camera) involves a veritable village of “others”, including law enforcement. But there are other ways to snap a picture from afar. The auto-timer and the intervalometer both make good mechanical friends, though they chatter incessantly. Human companionship, in any event, most capaciously guarantees the injection of vitality into (our) ways of being and seeing. And thus there is, as ever, a we in every selfie. In this series, I have multiplied subjectivities in order to approximate objectivity. So here they are: my contrived dives into water, ice, and luscious light, along with some reflections on the surfaces of mediating screens. There’s no memento mori filter quite like a constellation of dust grains on a pixel matrix.
