This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context.
This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture—both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture.
This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.
Introduction. The Selfie as Visual Culture: A Methodological Quandary
Derek Conrad Murray
1. Counter-Selfies and the Real Subsumption of Society
Grant Bollmer
2. Self-Portraiture and Self Performance
Katherine Guinness
3. Proliferating Identity: Trans Selfies as Contemporary Art
Ace Lehner
4. The Evolution of the Selfie: Influencers, Feminism and Visual Culture
Derek Conrad Murray
5. How Selfies Think: The Cognitive Dimensions of Digital Photography
Kyle Parry
6. Domestic Snapshots: Female Self-Imaging Practices Then and Now
Soraya Murray
7. The Selfie in Consumer Culture
Jonathan Schroeder
8. Selfie Narcissism, Consumerism and the Pathologizing of Women
Derek Conrad Murray
Biography
Derek Conrad Murray is a Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
