LETS DO AN EXPERIMENT!
Back in the Victorian age, wealthy families would dress up in their best clothes and stand or sit still for several minutes in an effort to take a photograph with them being the subject matter. They were taken to give the best impressions of themselves- “We’re wealthy, we can afford to take a photograph in our nicest set of dress, look at us, immortalised in this photograph”. They were for a special occasion that only the rich could afford, or a family in middle class who saved up for an extremely important affair such as a wedding. Either way, each family insisted on looking the best that they could possibly could.
In 2010, the context of the photograph changed. People started taking photos of everything-food before they eat it, flowers on the side of the road and pictures of the beach with their toes in the sand. This was known as “life-blogging”. However, one of the main features in a photograph nowadays is themselves- a “selfie”. According to Wendt (2014), the first self-portrait with the hashtag #selfie was posted on Flickr in 2004. It’s been 11 years, and selfies are still around.
Today’s society promotes and also discourages the taking of a selfie, due to the many unwritten rules around taking one. If you are going to take a selfie, it has to be “perfect”, otherwise, don’t bother. There are so many tutorials on youtube and the internet on how to take the perfect selfie, because you can’t “just point the camera at your face and take a shot without planning—there's an art to taking attention-grabbing selfies that your friends will love seeing in their feeds” (Wikihow, n.d.). There’s video tutorials titled everything from “10 tips for a good selfie” to “The PERECT selfie- Makeup, apps, tips!”. Wendt (2014) states that people view the visual aspects of themselves as the entire sum of their identity and as a result, ignore their non-visual traits. So if the selfie isn’t perfect, then you’d be ridiculed for posting it. This is a theme that has carried on from the Victorian age; they may be taken for no reason whatsoever, but society still insists that we look our absolute best for it.
For females, a good selfie generally means having flawless makeup and a little bit of editing and a filter to show us at our “best”. Sometimes this deceives audiences into what we WANT to look like, as opposed to how we really are. My own experimental selfie challenges this by showing who society wants me to be and wants me to show the world, and who I really am. To achieve this, I asked a friend of mine to apply a “full face” of makeup to only one side of my face. This included a primer, BB cream, foundation, setting powder, contour, blush, three different eyeshadows, two different eyeliners, eyebrow pencil and mousse, mascara, lip liner and lipstick. That’s a lot of “everyday” makeup for females, just for one photo. The other side of my face was left completely untouched. I then took two photos of myself, with one hand covering the natural side of my face, and then the other covering the made-up side. Using an online app called “picmonkey”, I placed the photos side by side to show the clear difference between them. This was hard, as the makeup made my face more defined on one side and made it difficult to match up the sides of my face well. I did not edit any of these, although picmonkey offers the experience of this as well. I wanted to show how simply putting on makeup can make such a huge difference.
Although it can be argued that I look my best with makeup on and therefore keeping in time with the photographic traditions of the Victorian era, its not who I really am. I have thin, patchy eyebrows, dark bags under my eyes and pale lips with blemishes across my skin. My face is rounded and my skintone is uneven. A selfie is a self-portrait and should show who we really are. We can look our best without changing that, and that is a tradition that we as a society should celebrate and encourage.
References:
Wednt, B. (2014). The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the new self-portrait. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Institute of Network Cultures
WikiHow. (n.d.). How to take good selfies. Retrieved from http://www.wikihow.com/Take-Good-Selfies









