Universal Principles of Depicting Oneself across the Centuries: From Renaissance Self-Portraits to Selfie-Photographs

Abstract

Selfie-photography is generally thought of as a cultural mass phenomenon of the early 21st century, inseparably related to the development and triumph of the smartphone with integrated camera. Western culture, however, has been highly familiar with self-depictions since the Renaissance days. Putting the contemporary selfie into this historic context covering more than five centuries of cultural development from Dürer's (1500) famous “Self-Portrait at 28” (also known as “Selbstbildnis im Pelzrock”) to today's Instagram galleries allows for identifying central parallels concerning the technical and social antecedents as well as common underlying psychological factors and shared properties of different kinds of self-depiction. The article provides an overview of the types of contemporary photographic selfies and compares them with painted self-portraits. Finally, this historic perspective leads us to the insight that self-portraits as well as selfies are both referring to nothing less than the “conditio humana.”

Selfies as Duplex Non-verbal Communication: Human—Media Interaction, Human—Human Interaction, Case Study, and Research Manifesto

“…This sex-related bias has been confirmed in many other corpora of photographic portraits (discussed in the Case Study section later on in this paper), including online profile pictures (Smith and Cooley, 2012) and, indeed, selfies (Babic et al, 2018). In a similar vein, a recent comparison of painted self-portraits to selfies (Carbon, 2017) stressed common psychological as well as technical constraints suggesting strong parallels. This view is consistent with studies of compositional biases in selfie images.…”

“…The same search on the specialist database PubMed yields only about 60 hits, but the bulk of these papers consists of policy commentaries, historical narratives, clinical studies, and health communication applications with limited empirical content. The relatively few papers of interest for the current project may be grouped into three broad categories: studies attempting to connect selfierelated behaviors to personality and motivation (Qiu et al, 2015;Sorokowski et al, 2015;Dhir et al, 2016Dhir et al, , 2017Sorokowska et al, 2016;Sung et al, 2016;Baiocco et al, 2017;Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017;Etgar and Amichai-Hamburger, 2017;Karwowski and Brzeski, 2017;Krämer et al, 2017;Musil et al, 2017); studies assessing visual compositional choices for selfies, sometimes in relation to neuropsychological hypotheses (Bruno and Bertamini, 2013;Bruno et al, 2014Bruno et al, , 2015Bruno et al, , 2017Lindell, 2017a,b;Manovich et al, 2017;Schneider and Carbon, 2017;Sedgewick et al, 2017;Babic et al, 2018), and theory papers (Frosh, 2015;Senft and Baym, 2015;Eagar and Dann, 2016;Lim, 2016;Carbon, 2017;Kozinets et al, 2017;Bruno et al, 2018). While interesting, these findings and analyses remain scattered and in need of a common theoretical framework.…”

Self in Art/Self As Art: Museum Selfies As Identity Work

“…Second, we identified selfies that strive to be artistic and therefore identify the selfie-taker as an artist. These selfies are different from others in that they play with light, camera angles and unique perspectives, and echo more closely than most other analyzed selfies the standards of self portraiture described by Carbon (2017). The selves portrayed in these pictures often strike an artistic-looking pose, such as looking off meaningfully into the distance, or with the hand gesticulating, touching the face or the chin.…”

Autofotografia e relato de si: materialidades digitais e audiência algorítmica na prática de selfie

“…However, the current researches 3 about the phenomenon work with diverse objectives and perspective. We have identified some of them: the relationship between public and private (LASÉN, 2013, SANTOS, 2016BAKER, 2016); the observation of psychological or behavioral factors (CARBON, 2017, LINDELL, 2017, MEESE et al, 2015TEWARI, 2016, SUNG et al, 2016MARQUEZ, 2015); the transformations of intimacy or relationship between selfie, gender, and sexuality (ČUŠ BABIČ;ROPERT;MUSIL, 2018, LASÉN, 2013GARCÍA, 2015, MIGUEL, 2016, NAEZER, 2018; and those that understand selfie as a set of practice or sociotechnical networks (CRUZ;THORNHAM, 2015, FROSH, 2015, HESS, 2015BAYM, 2015), or that take into account digital materialities and/or platform studies and digital methods (MONTARDO, 2019, WARFIELD, 2016. In other studies, it is assumed that there is a direct link between selfies and individualistic and narcissistic social formats, seeking to understand the reasons for this involvement (HALPERN;VALENZUELA;KATZ, 2016, OLIVEIRA, 2015, PERSICHETTI, 2013SUNG et al, 2016).…”