I’ve always found it very unusual to witness people posing for photographs, and especially in public.
When I get to observe this kind of thing, I want to note that it generally involves more than one person. The act of the selfie deserves extensive mention, but I’m going to skip over it here. Instead, I’d like to paint the image of a group of people huddled proximate to one another; there is that second or two of motion as every makes their last minute adjustments, bodies shift, faces moving. If you let your eyes fall slack on this act of preparation, you can feel it in the momentary delerium as the image tightens up, focuses, and becomes Correct.

The weird feeling arises out of an understanding that I am participating in a voyeuristic double act, watching someone prepare themselves for visual consumption. That isn’t to say there is anything weird about wanting to look a certain way in the photographs you take. At the same time, the reflexivity present in posing is one that has marred the whole span of my life, as I recall every instance of squinting and squirming among family members at some restaurant gathering (to appease a grandfather, whom out of a simple filial love, I allow to undergo another present act of photographic geneology). But to be on the outside of this whole shenanigan inflects the act with a peculiar kind of mental funk.

This whole event is even weirder when we think of the selfie as the new dominant mode of self-photography. The lens has seldom ever been turned onto us in the way that it is now. In antiquity, one would pose in front of it (the lens, the gaze). But now, with the selfie, photography is not just the gaze turned inward but the mirror too, in whose reflection constitute our selves; Lacan, I think, would have a field day.

What I think makes this more interesting is when we bring in the work of Walter Benjamin, the 20th century media critic, whose seminal text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction”, struggled with the implications of what it meant for images to be easily reproduced and disseminated in the media after the advent of photography and film. Beyond Benjamin’s world is the one we live in now, where technological reproduction has been accelerated to breakneck velocities and the concept of Virality is precisely a gauge of that sort of thing. Our Infosphere, where people can release their image into this arena and watch it spore, leaves me wondering how that affects our conception of ourselves, where we no longer deliberate our image as a singular instance outside of ourselves, but as one specifically manufactured for an anticipated level of reproduction, distribution, and consumption.