Drawn from Matt Colquhoun’s recent book Narcissus in Bloom (Repeater Books, 2023), which traces the art-historical development of the self-portrait alongside our ever-changing senses of self, this talk will explore how the selfie is not simply a product of subjective stasis in a stagnant capitalist world, but rather a measure of our capacity for self-transformation and a window into the changes we are constantly undergoing.
In our modern world, the selfie is a ubiquitous form of self-expression. With front-facing cameras installed on every smartphone, we have never been more preoccupied with presenting ourselves to the world around us. In light of this, however, we are now prone to moralising against this most contemporaneous mode of self-expression. Ours is a ‘culture of narcissism’, or so we are told, and it is to our detriment that we remain so preoccupied with ourselves.
And yet, beyond his recent capture by folk psychology, the story of Narcissus has been integral to our understanding of the production of art and culture for centuries. For the Renaissance art critic Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), for example, Narcissus was nothing less than the “inventor of painting”, and his namesake “the flower of all the arts” – for what is it to create “if not to catch with art that surface of the spring?” The myth of Narcissus is thus the story of our first fleeting encounters with the natural world and the self’s place within it. It is the dramatization of that all-too-human desire to capture and preserve the beauty we see within and around us.
Through the invention of photography, we have both become more capable of looking at ourselves and been made all the more aware of how fleeting our senses of self can be.
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Matt Colquhoun is a writer and photographer from Hull, UK. Best known for writing about the late Mark Fisher, their most recent book, Narcissus in Bloom, was published by Repeater Books in 2023. Currently a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Newcastle University, they blog at xenogothic.com.