A Portrait of a ‘Selfie’ in the Making: An Iconological Analysis of Roberto Schmidt's Photograph of Three World Leaders Taking a Selfie

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This paper focuses on an iconological analysis of Roberto Schmidt’s photograph of Danish PrimeMinister 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 onDecember 10th, 2013, at the First National Bank Stadium in Soweto. This analysis shows thecompositional strength of the photograph and argues that part of its power rests in the way itcontains, 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 profileportrait or the front-faced memorial portrait.Schmidt’s photograph also offers an image that captures the complex nature of the public andprivate images of public figures, and the issues of visibility in relation to power or fame. Thisleads to comments on Obama’s use of selfies in his communication strategy during his time at theWhite 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 theselfie 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, havespread conventionality in selfie photography, not only making for a normative, standardized orformulaic arrangement of the body posture, but also for a transformation of both thephotographed’s and the viewer’s gaze, arguably weakening the potential experience of an aurafor the viewer, and leading to a type of image (selfies) and skewed gaze which, as argued byBertrand Naivin, breaks away from the traditions of (self-) portraits.