A Portrait of a ‘Selfie’ in the Making

Résumé 0

This paper focuses on an iconological analysis of Roberto Schmidt’s photograph of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt taking a selfie with U.S. President Barack Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron during late President Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on December 10th, 2013, at the First National Bank Stadium in Soweto. This analysis shows the compositional strength of the photograph and argues that part of its power rests in the way it contains, albeit unintentionally, a sort of lexicon of portraiture, iconically juxtaposing new forms (selfie-posture) with others that evoke cultural archives, such as the Renaissance female profile portrait or the front-faced memorial portrait.Schmidt’s photograph also offers an image that captures the complex nature of the public and private images of public figures, and the issues of visibility in relation to power or fame. This leads to comments on Obama’s use of selfies in his communication strategy during his time at the White House.Finally, the multiplicity of gaze directions in Roberto Schmidt’s photograph as well as its meta-photographical dimension opens up a discussion on the more general issue on the nature of the selfie per se, with its transformation of the connection between sitters, photographer and viewer, in terms of distance, focus and exchange of gazes. Current technological developments of front-faced cameras, allowing an unprecedented increase in reproducibility and exposure levels, have spread conventionality in selfie photography, not only making for a normative, standardized or formulaic arrangement of the body posture, but also for a transformation of both the photographed’s and the viewer’s gaze, arguably weakening the potential experience of an aura for the viewer, and leading to a type of image (selfies) and skewed gaze which, as argued by Bertrand Naivin, breaks away from the traditions of (self-) portraits.