Weekly Photo Challenge: Selfie
I like breaking the rules, especially when it comes to photography. That is easier said than done and it took me a while to find the perfect image for this particular challenge, hence the delay.
The urban dictionary defines a “selfie” as a picture taken of yourself (tick) to be uploaded on any social networking site (almost tick) and where you can usually see the person’s arm holding out the camera, proof that the poor fellow is quite friendless and therefore has no one else to take their picture (this one made me laugh out loud). I wonder… is our modern world of ultra-connectivity populated by lonesome multitudes?
About this image: My shadow self in Central Park, New York. Curtesy of smartphone reliability, it aims to be a representation of how much we hide in our digital self-portraits. Selfies are seldom candid.
vic briggs 
Love it!! Awesome photo/selfie Inspiring 🙂
Many thanks. Unusual I know, but I wanted to take some time to consider the selfie-craze from a different angle (both metaphorically and literally). I am glad you like it.
It really was great, thank you for sharing! Have a blessed week and keep up the great work 🙂
A pleasure, especially when it reaches through and speaks to others too. Wishing you a beautiful week ahead.
Thank you God bless you lots 🙂
Nice selfie. I like your comment about “…how much we hide in our digital self-portraits.” I rarely take selfies and I never post them on my blog or on other social media sites, like Facebook or Instagram. But, as I wrote in a post a while back about how blogging is narcissistic, blogging “…is a selfie, but with words instead of a picture.”
Thank you. An interesting interpretation, certainly. We do put a lot of ourselves in what we write. Our words reflect shards of our own selves, and yet the veil is drawn only in part. Not even memoirs will offer full accounts of who we are and the journeys that have brought us to our desks.
Perhaps blogging can be narcissistic when it is used as a means to gaze at oneself, rather than reach out to others. I would like to believe that for the many, the opposite is true.
We all blog because we want to reach out to others. Else, why not just write something and save what we wrote on our computer’s hard drive or keep our words in a handwritten diary for only us to read?
We blog because we want others to read what we write. We have something important to say, something others will benefit from or be moved by reading. We are proud of our writing, be it expressions of opinions, observations of the world around us, flash fiction, poetry, or photography and we want to share it all with others.
We take selfies and post them for people to see. It’s our way of saying “look at me, look at what I’m doing.” We post our words on our blogs for people to read. It’s our way of saying,” read what I have to say, see what I’m thinking, feeling, experiencing.”
Wanting to reach out to others through our blogs and being somewhat narcissistic go, in my humble opinion (which I’m more than happy to share with others via my blog posts), hand-in-hand.
Thank you for elaborating on your earlier comment. I will admit that when I first started blogging I did not expect that anyone would want to read what I share. My journey started accidentally and it continued as a journal. In writing I try to make sense of the world. In many respects it is the stories of others rather than my own that fascinate me most, and yet a degree of self-reflexivity is of course unavoidable.
Very creative!
Thank you!
Thank you, Susan. It was indeed a challenge in more ways than one.
I love your artistic, shadow selfie, Vic. SO much better than the narcissistic, look-at-me-I’m-wonderful kind – *squirming at cringing traditional selfie posted for recent prompt…resolving never to post selfie ever again unless artistic kind*
🙂
Thank you, Lee-Anne. Artists have been known to create self-portraits before the onslaught of social media and I always wondered about their intent. Are they asking a question or offering an answer? Is it a glimpse perhaps into their inner world? Could it be their interpretation of what the world sees, or perhaps an exercise in how their own perception of oneself differs from that of others…
On networking sites we are visible through both images and the messages we post. Each are fragments of us, yet much remains hidden and it is this aspect of anonymity-in-visibility that I wanted to focus on.
You have done that perfectly. 🙂
Thank you 🙂