Self/ie

Self/ie

Okay, confession time. I take a lot of selfies. Like A LOT of selfies. I know its pretty much expected by a 20 year old college student, but I feel my selfie taking exceeds even the stereotypical expectations. I take selfies everyday and for just no reason. I take them when I look especially good, when I look especially bad, when I put on full makeup or no makeup, when I’m with my friends but especially when I am alone. I’ve been trying to figure out why I am compelled to take so many pictures of myself and I think it boils down to a two main reasons.
Firstly, because I want to remember what I was doing or what I looked like at a certain time or day. So maybe when I get older my kids can see how I looked my first day of college, or what I wore to my birthday when I turned 20. I love the idea of creating keepsakes. But I think the more main reason is because I am trying to look a certain way. I am trying to emulate a particular look or style or idea. Women are told their entire lives that in order to be accepted, loved, lusted after, wanted, respected, taken seriously, etc. they have to look a certain way. This can be difficult, no one can look all these ways at once. So I try to see what I can look like in each picture. Which boxes I can fill with different looks, different angles, different hair and makeup, and different expressions.

This text is an exploration of a movement away from expectations. In these images I don’t look like a person anymore, my selfie has turned into unrecognizable art. So there is another box I can fill. I can be art. But this text is different than any other selfie I have ever taken, no matter how edited. When one looks at this, they are not judging me, they may not even know it is a picture of me. They aren’t trying to evaluate or quantify my personality based on their perception of the picture, they are just seeing art. They can judge something I made, not how I look. I think it can be hard for women to have that luxury. Women are constantly judged by how they look instead of what they do. They have to look a certain way to get reactions they want from people. This turns women into a chameleon, constantly changing and adapting to match the environment in the way they are supposed to. So in this picture I don’t look the way I am supposed to, I don’t even look like a person at all. I look like art that I myself created, and sometimes that’s all I want to be.