Identity Crafting: Reading the Agency and Art Implicit in Selfies

The aim of this article is to unravel the craftsmanship of online identities implicit in taking and sharing selfies and to measure the immediate or resulting violence by imposed definition upon the subject-photographer. This paper especially focuses on the identity building of young women on the social networking platform Instagram. Crucial to the research are Susan Sontag’s work on photography philosophy relating to violence inflicted upon subjects, Gregory Ulmer’s work on electracy, and Liana De Girolami Cheney’s research into artistic conventions of selfportraiture dating back from the Renaissance to the present. The highly constructed nature of selfies, an emerging art form that can be viewed as continuance in self-portraiture, functions dually to give the artist agency and to enact violence against him or herself. According to Susan Sontag (1977), since photography has become an accessible form of recordkeeping, the human imagination has developed a new “grammar and ethics of seeing” (p. 3). As mechanical as this mimetic form is, promising the capacity “to hold the whole world in our heads,” photography is as interpretative and dishonest as any other visual art form (p. 3). Indeed, the art of photography often produces devastating social consequences when accepted as truth. Sontag continues, “there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (p. 7). As the language surrounding photography suggests, the act of capturing a person’s image or shooting a camera is an act of violence; a photograph is shot to contextualize its subjects in a way that looks like truth. Yet the photograph—as infallible as the medium seems—is as contrived as any other art form. Because of its easily masked manipulation the photograph becomes dangerous in how it portrays its subjects. But how does this translate when the photographer and the subject are one and the same? Is the selfie photographer perpetrating self-harm against his or her own identity or is he or she inflicting violence upon the conventions of self-portraiture? Since the invention of the front-facing camera, first introduced with the iPhone 4 in 2010, the selfie has emerged as a new form of portraiture. Instead of being considered an art form, it is more often used in the lives of young adults as evidence of the increasing narcissism and unhealthy dependence on and isolation in technology found in the behavior of young adults. Frequently headlines herald the end of face-to-face communication as members of the Me Generation loses themselves in smartphones (Fallon, 2014, p. 54). There is a staunch condemnation of the “insularity of the average smartphone user’s world—experienced only through screens as the older generations imagine” (p. 55). In reality, this opinion conflicts with the overwhelming sharing capacities smartphones offer. Moreover, “the impulse to share a selfie” is an act of community rather than one of isolation, as it is gesturing to and sharing with others (p. 55). The selfie is instrumental in maintaining the human element in online communities and in the preservation of relationships during spatial absences. This article will examine Sontag’s ideas involving the violence of photography as a means to assert control over the perception of reality in relation to the selfie. In other words, the selfie could be an attempt to manipulate how one is viewed through the use of online spaces. Assuming artistic license over