Abstract
Much of the current writing on selfies, Instagram, or camera-phone photography in general tends to decontextualize these phenomena and analyze them on their own, without referring to historical precedents. The medium of photography tends to become invisible, while photographs posted on Instagram or other platforms are treated as pure and transparent data, from which conclusions about their makers and their audience are being made. What is still missing, and what we propose to bring back into focus, is more attention to the medium of photography as such. There was photography before mobile phones, and photography was shared socially before Instagram. While the new image-making technologies and image-sharing platforms, no doubt, change our definition of photography, much of what is being interpreted as “new” has roots in photographic practices of earlier decades. We believe that adding such historical perspective would expand our understanding of present-day cultural phenomena and let us analyze them as part of historical continuities. It is time to bring photography back into our discussion about photography in social media. The chapter follows this request by focusing on the phenomenon of “competitive photography” and the anti-selfie genre as a backdrop to explore contemporary and historical dimensions of the selfie as a photographic practice.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See http://selfiecity.net (2014) and http://selfiecity.net/london (2015).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The term was first introduced in an earlier article; see Tifentale (2016b).
- 7.
See, e.g. the official magazine of the International Federation of Photographic Art, Camera (published by publishing house C. J. Bucher, Luzerne, Switzerland, in German, English, and French, and circulated worldwide) and especially its issues from January 1950 to December 1966.
- 8.
See a detail of the collage made by Alise Tifentale, again, via https://goo.gl/photos/PuwYRgtbHpMBkWH99.
- 9.
For an in-depth analysis of a number of styles of Instagram photography, see Manovich (2016a).
- 10.
See examples of the home mode photography on Instagram in a montage by Lev Manovich (2016a) online at https://goo.gl/photos/4yChivJLXSmyRt6y9.
- 11.
Of course, since, as of 2015, 70 percent of Instagram users were outside of United States, the patterns in other parts of the world may be different.
- 12.
For details see http://selfiecity.net/london.
- 13.
See also Chap. 6 by Hagi Kenaan in this volume.
- 14.
Examples of such photos are shown in a montage by Lev Manovich, online at https://goo.gl/photos/9Vw5Kk8iZSzj7fqYA.
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Acknowledgments
The first part of the chapter (“Here Comes the New Photographer … Again!,” “Instagram and Competitive Photography,” and “Competitive Photography Is a Game of Rules”) was written by Alise Tifentale, and the second part (“Competitive and Noncompetitive Photography on Instagram” and “Competitive Photography and Anti-Selfie Genre”) was written by Lev Manovich. The Selfiecity (2014–2015) project was created by Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, Daniel Goddemeyer, Dominikus Baur, Mehrdad Yazdani, Jay Chow, Alise Tifentale, and Nadav Hochman. The development of this project was supported by the Graduate Center, City University of New York, California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The authors of this chapter would like to thank the editors, Jens Ruchatz, Sabine Wirth, and Julia Eckel, as well as the anonymous reader from Palgrave Macmillan for their excellent questions and comments.
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Tifentale, A., Manovich, L. (2018). Competitive Photography and the Presentation of the Self. In: Eckel, J., Ruchatz, J., Wirth, S. (eds) Exploring the Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57949-8_8
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