Berlin: Self Snap
The NY Times featured an article on people photographing themselves with their mobile phones, the next hip thing. Dutch visual artist Hester Scheurwater took this art to a whole new level.
“This really represents the shift of the photograph serving as a memorial function to a communication device,” said Geoffrey Batchen, formerly of the City University of New York and now a professor of art history at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, who has written extensively on historical and contemporary photography. “The camera was used to record something that happened so it could be remembered. Now it’s used immediately. It’s uploaded to Facebook to say, ‘Here I am in Istanbul’ or whatever, so it also goes back and forth between personal and promotional use. It really represents the refashioning of the self for a semipublic view.”
I don’t like taking pictures of myself, it still feels weird.
