As someone who is not an avid selfie-taker, I thought that it would be difficult to find selfies that really captured my sense of humor and personality. Luckily I found a photo album from when I went to Sienna, Italy two years ago that provided me with some diamonds in the rough.
In each of these three photos my clothing choice adds to the silliness of my presentation. The reason I even took the first photo was because many of my friends on my trip were making fun of me because my friend Nick and I decided to tuck our pants into our boots. We flashed our boots so much that it actually started making our other friends angry that we didn’t un-tuck our pants, and this just made us laugh harder. Ultimately, I wanted to commemorate this overwhelmingly funny, yet incredibly stupid moment by taking a picture with nick in the mirror of our hotel lobby. I think the artwork of cherubs and little boys in the background really captures the whimsy of Nick and I (Also, Nick modeled his shoes much better than I did).
Skipping to the third photo is a picture of myself laying down in my bedroom in Venice with the mask of “Medico della Peste,” or the plague doctor. Before I went to Italy I had essentially one mission. That mission was to find a plague doctor’s mask and purchase it. The reason was because I used to play a video game series called “Assassin’s Creed” and many of the games were set in Renaissance Italy and had characters that were doctors who wore those masks. For some reason, I thought those masks were the coolest looking things ever and I knew that when I went to Venice they would definitely have the masks because Carnivale happens every year in Venice. In this one photo, my love of History, Video Games, and ridiculous hedonistic purchases is on full display all in the comfort of my own hotel bed.
Now going back to the second photo is a picture of my friend Emily and I standing in front of a piece of street art in the middle of Venice. I am sporting my Elton John sunglasses that I had bought minutes before the photo was taken for about 5 Euro, and my friend Emily is donning her signature deadpan facial expression. In the moment, Emily and I thought that the graffiti looked really cool and really funny so our intention was to just take a funny picture in Venice together, but looking at it closer the Irony of the photo is unreal. That cartoon drawing is clearly a caricature of American tourists: The character’s stomach is poking through her shirt making fun of America’s obesity problem especially in relation to Italy’s; she is carrying bags from Gucci and Louis Vitton mocking how needlessly American’s spend their money on high end clothes while in Italy; a map is sticking out of her pocket to even further highlight how obvious American’s make themselves look when they are tourists in another country; and lastly the eyes and mouth of the character are X’d out to show what I believe is Americans blindly buying needless items and not even bothering to learn another language, thus not being able to communicate with anyone in the city.
The angle of this photo and how the caricature looms over us is incredibly ironic because it accentuates the blindness of us as tourists. I didn’t even realize how my actions in another country actually came across to the inhabitants of the cities I visited. In fact, I was so unaware of my actions that I took a picture below a character that was basically a reflection of myself and my social class. In each of these photos I am also flaunting clothes which scream at the very least, “I HAVE MONEY.” While all of these photos also highlight how I like to go with the flow and have fun while rolling with everything, analyzing them further has made me think a lot more about how they appear to others and how I’m not completely proud of how they turn out all the time.
