Selfies, Digital Self-Portraits, and the Politicization of Intimacy

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This text explores the representation of one’s intimate images, namely selfies, and the possibility of their political implications. It focuses on the photo-sharing website Flickr, partly because this platform enables its users to sort their photographs into albums, which in turn allows them to bring their self-portraits to the forefront, if they wish. Empowerment, that is to say taking back control over one’s representation, is a sign of the politicization of selfies and digital self-portraits. Can selfies be a means of empowerment when, shot in a museum, the image itself posits that the photographer’s very being is a work of art? Can they change our relationship to writing by encouraging neologisms and by creating the conditions for the writing of first-person, hybrid narratives mixing text and photography? The paradox of the politicization of selfies is that photographers use the lever of their intimacy to convey political messages. This can take the form of depicting a gender-reassignment process, or health issues, for example. At the origin of the articulation of a photographer’s politicization of their intimacy is a need for validation of the intimate self through audience response. On the audience’s side, each intimate self-portrait gives the possibility of a cathartic identification between photographer and viewer, which breaks the isolation of both protagonists in the relationship. Thus, selfies and self-portraits can re-empower photographers and viewers who consider that they belong to a misrepresented minority. We will question in what measure selfies and self-portraits can be an infrapolitical way of fighting against erasure.