The thought may alternatively repel or seduce depending on one's faith in humanity, but the holiest of photo ops needn't be taken as irreverence. We capture moments to remember. Recording special moments digitally is as natural today as crying with Molly when Sam ascends to heaven at the end of Ghost. But in earlier times we had fewer choices to "capture" a scene or event: painting, poetry, story, song. Each required a certain talent--not to mention time and labor--to render the experience memorable. Even with photography's advent, the thing captured either seemed worth capturing, (Yosemite Falls in winter) or creative expertise rendered it worth seeing (Mapplethorpe's calla lilies). Perhaps you wanted to immortalize little Cindy's birthday, or her graduation, or her wedding: into the photo album it's glued. Photography memorializes the unique. With iPhones--hand-carried, packed in purses, or tucked into back pockets like pistols--recording the experience goes hand in hand with living it. More than that. We don't record to remember: we record to post. More than that. Posting is performing for an audience. Exhibitionists need voyeurs.
Recall a cringe worthy Oscar night gambit: during the 2017 awards the hapless Jimmy Kimmel hushes the crowd, dims the Dolby Theater lights, and ushers in from side stage door unsuspecting tourists who believed they were visiting yet another Hollywood landmark. When the lights flood the theater, the audience erupts in applause, and the tourists file in eyes wide, mouths agape, led by their camera phones in hand or mounted on selfie sticks. At this point, ushered by Kimmel into the presence of those front row Hollywood stars in the flesh, they who offer so much delight onscreen to inspire a costly bus tour in hopes of catching a passing glimpse of one ducking into a Starbucks, you’d think the cameras would drop. No, the tourists kept their camera phones aimed like lasers on the politely smiling celebrities, choosing to record this dreamed-of moment over the actual experience of the stars in their glittering presence. Through the magical medium of film these actors charm and inspire, and now the veil is rent. Ecce homo, Denzel Washington! But the camera phones continue panning and jostling for posterity. Perhaps the sheer unreality of being thrust into the presence of celebrity triggered the need for digitally recorded proof. More likely, any experience beyond the mundane gains validity only if posted on social media (even the mundane often makes the cut).
A reality mystifies and saddens: in early December 2016 CNN news online reported on an 18-year old Texas teenager, Brandy Vela, who committed suicide in her bedroom after suffering from a long history of cyberbullying. They targeted her weight, called her fat and ugly. She was neither, quite beautiful with sparkling sky blue eyes and welcoming smile. Partway through the video, Brandy’s 22-year old sister painfully, tearfully recalls confronting Brandy in her bedroom, finding her against the wall with a gun pointed at her chest, and pleading “Brandy no, Brandy no!” The video jumps from delightful photos of a cheerful Brandy to an interview with the sister, a brother, and an unidentified young woman. At one point, the camera has panned out to show the three sitting in a front yard. In a dull tone emptied by grief, the brother offers to the imagined bullies, perhaps following the story, an eerie and confounding “I’m glad you got what you wanted…I hope this makes you happy.” Then with a voiceover naming Victor Vela as Brandy’s older brother, the camera zooms on the two young women on a bench. Both are scroll thumbing iPhones while the brother gazes blankly downward.
It’s entirely possible the women are cherishing the many social media memorials and posts of condolences, and their shock and grieving buoys them sadly along. But the all too familiar faces bowing into flashing screens for the next entertaining moment seemed an unsettling reminder of the terrible draw. Having undergone such an immense tragedy spearheaded by trolling bullies on social media, one wonders how the women could bring themselves only days later to sail again those pirated seas. More distressing, how did this bright and well-liked high school senior succumb to the ubiquitous trolls? Anonymous, faceless, hiding behind fake identities, cowardly—the angry epithets are always tossed, imagining the perpetrators tuning in here and everywhere to feel the sting of the barbs. But why did Brandy believe the taunts of people she most likely didn’t know? Why didn’t she turn the machine off? Easier said than done, comes the retort, but that only cuts ice with earlier generations. The emotional lives of Brandy’s generation flow imperceptibly between unrecorded (“real”) life and a many-windowed recording interface of social media: messaged, Instagrammed, Snapchatted, tweeted and retweeted, a swirling hyperreal “life”.
The buzzword often used to brand the draw of pervasive social media is narcissism. Even “buzzword” is apt, connoting information frantically exchanged. It's true a mild whiff of narcissism emanates from Brandy Vela’s (or any other teenager’s) updated Facebook cover photo every month or so, her candy-colored lips puckered teasingly. But it seems prudish to point a finger. Narcissism is normalized, as Brandy and everyone else got swept up in the unrelenting demands for self-validation. Notice that her legion of faceless bullies hounding her to suicide practiced a sinister strain of narcissism: emboldened to derive malicious pleasure from verbally attacking another anonymously without consequences. No doubt desire for the mirrored image is old as myth. Yet it is worth remembering that Narcissus, tired and sweaty from hunting (in Thomas Bulfinch’s retelling), had come upon the clear fountain
with water like silver, to which the shepherds never drove their flocks, nor the mountain goats resorted, nor any of the beasts of the forest; neither was it defaced with fallen leaves or branches; but the grass grew fresh around it, and the rocks sheltered it from the sun.
Narcissus had stumbled upon a backpacker’s idyllic spot in the wilderness. When the youth bends over to lap from the waters, he suddenly sees a beautiful water spirit living in the fountain. Gorgeous locks of hair, ivory neck, rounded cheeks, “the glow of health and exercise.” Reaching out to embrace the spirit, Narcissus discovers the crystal lover also reaching out to him. So enthralled is the beguiled lover, he forsakes any other nourishment except devotion. Kept from embracing his beloved, he sheds tears, ruffling the mirrored surface and causing the spirit’s presence to fade. Narcissus entreats it, “Stay… Let me at least gaze upon you, if I may not touch you.” Meditating on this divine vision, Narcissus’s body pales, loses its strength, and he dies a husk. Even unto death, his shade crossing the Stygian waters gazes over the side of the boat. The water nymphs mourned his passing, yet when they came for his body to burn upon a funeral pyre, it was gone. Narcissus is transformed into a flower by the water’s edge, its heart purple, gathering round itself white leaves.
One could suggest Narcissus’s faith never wavers after his initial glance at the beautiful vision. As the myth is given, the youth never realizes he gazes upon his own reflection. Recall Kahlil Gibran’s tale of the mirrored sphere hanging in the heavens: when the earth was born it fell and shattered into millions of pieces, such that when any man picks up a shard, he can look into it and rightfully claim I have found the true religion. Perhaps the myth of Narcissus speaks to the folly of ever catching sight of the divine beyond projecting our images in space and time, as John Lennon noted.
A long cultural moment arose a few generations back when narcissism gained legitimacy as accepted social norm. Christopher Lasch in his acclaimed and controversial 1979 “The Culture of Narcissism: America in the Age of Diminishing Expectations” noted the American identity’s shift away from a romantic but laudable American sense in “historical continuity,” the idea of belonging to a succession of American generations evolving from a deeper past giving birth to a future. When Lasch was writing, the Me Generation was thriving. He saw American liberalism/Progressivism chipping away at the long-standing pillars of patriarchal authority (weakening the Freudian inspired “social superego”) which into the 19th century manifested collectively as fathers, teachers, and ministers.
Breaking from those traditional overseers one could foster organic egalitarian communities. Instead, groupings splintered into self-absorbed strivings for the merely personal and permissive: self-realization instead of social responsibility. Individualism saw the world as a wilderness through which a path is carved and society built. Narcissism gazes upon the world as mirror. The advent of social media, and the devices that keep its blood flowing, fosters the illusion of community, but a community skewed: performers awaiting applause. But because so little time, interest, or effort is invested in the performance—one can anywhere record and post anything on social media—so the gratification, no matter how superficial, must be immediate, occurring in and relevant to only the present, like a soap balloon rising on a breath. Only the fleeting moment sacred. Lasch’s prognosis of the culture of narcissism was lives in a state of restless, ongoing, unsatisfied desire. And the man died before Facebook.
But gazing enraptured at our own image isn’t the current narcissism. Consider a common strategy most often employed by young women shooting for Instagram model stardom. A profile pic showing the profiler taking a pic of herself while looking into a (usually) full body mirror in their bathroom. Nearly out the door on a Saturday night, she pauses, captivated, at the mirror. The background: shower curtain and toilet. The image we see is the person looking intently into the face of her device, which is pointed at her own reflection in the mirror. The shot is snapped and quickly uploaded onto her chosen site(s). Scrolling late one evening, we find ourselves gazing on a photographic image of the person looking into the face of her device through which she is gazing at her own reflection in the full length mirror. She is not looking at us, her supposed intended audience, but admiringly at her own image which is reduced in her device and which itself gazes into the mirror. So we are given her posed photographic image only as she poses for a device snapping an image in the mirror of herself posing in front of that mirror. And she wants everybody to acknowledge it with likes, an act of effortless validation. One can forgive Narcissus in the end, truly alone, enchanted...
...Is the selfie a longing for a lost aura, that inner presence of self-respect abiding when no one is looking? Experiences worth having have always been worth recording, the journal, the photo album, but these were usually reserved for one’s own remembrances. Now it seems experiences aren’t valid unless recorded and shared. Fans live-stream blurry and shaky footage of a U2 show from their nosebleed seats to bask in our admiration that they scored tickets and attended. Upload your Cobb salad and mimosa to Tumblr and Sunday brunch is proven. Can I just meet an old friend for coffee, or must I capture a smiling selfie to demonstrate to friends that I have an old friend? Recording and uploading to social media is now required if experiences are to wear the aura of authenticity.
I employ aura here slightly modified from Walter Benjamin’s use in his often referenced if archaically titled “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from 1936. He defined it as what surrounds an object viewed at a distance, or how we experience an object’s uniqueness. In the natural world, we gaze in erotic wonder upon a beautiful face. Children are drawn to the aura of the starfish at low tide upon a barnacled rock buffeted by briny sea winds in summers, delighting in the creature’s five-pointed iconic geometry, and with terrible difficulty try to pry it from its home (how tenaciously the creature holds onto the rock, abiding in the tidal rhythms, suggests the necessary embedding of the starfish’s unique place in its natural context; kids, leave the damn thing alone).
The aura’s fate in a work of art in the era of technical reproduction was Benjamin’s interest. Ancient cave paintings possess auras suggesting their shamanic power, so deeply in the earth were they drawn and difficult to access. Animals were sketched to capture their spirit for a successful hunt, not to spice up the prehistoric hovel. An idol’s aura possessed authoritative power which the devoted worshiped and marauding usurpers defaced. Witness headless statues littering ancient sites. Iconoclastic paintings of saints were veiled, the power of their aura witnessed only by the holy, or those in charge of the temple. Indeed, in 2010 I knelt before the icon of the Virgin, the Shaghoura, reportedly painted by St. Luke the Evangelist, housed in the Our Lady of the Patriarchal Monastery in Saydnaya, Syria. Its beauty, however, was curtained off with a stern nun keeping the line moving. To dissolve the power of the iconic saintly image, the eyes are scratched from the face. Think of the negation of female power in the 6th century image of St Paul and St Thecla in the Grotto near Ephesus, Turkey. As John Dominic Crossan notes in his study of the Apostle Paul, both male and female figures iconographically depicted on the cave’s wall were of equal height, therefore of equal importance. Paul and Thecla were painted right hands raised in a gesture signaling their authority (also equal) as teachers. But through the centuries Paul’s figure remained untouched, whereas Thecla’s raised hand was erased, and her eyes scraped white, her spiritual authority silenced and blinded.
In his essay, Benjamin reflected on the unprecedented change in works of art that were reproduced technically rather than manually, noting what he called “the decay of the aura” of authenticity. Works of art have always been reproducible for various reasons, whether creating replicas, woodcuts, printing, or lithography. But pictorial reproduction—photography—was something entirely different. In every other work of art reproduced, the original exists from which copies were made, and so retains an aura of authenticity—that enduring presence in a specific time and place, its unique cultural and historical tradition in which it was created, leaving traces when it deteriorates, ages, or changes ownership. One can manually reproduce a painting and attempt to pass it off as the original, but close analysis can unearth the forgery—and so the original maintains is authentic heritage in and by that difference.
But Benjamin argues that with photography, “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” If one can reproduce from the negative any number of copies, all identical depending on the technology, it’s pointless to ask for the “original” photograph—the original is the negative, the shadowy brown chrysalis awaiting wings. Photographs can still retain aesthetic value, of course, considered works of art.
The blurry and shaky footage of U2 rocking out on a tiny stage a hundred yards away with negligible sound quality will have few tuning in for the duration. The Cobb salad looks like a salad. And it’s your old friend with whom you’ve reacquainted: why bring us into the picture? Posting brings us delight, and the likes, thumbs up, red hearts, and laughing tears streaming emojis garnered keep the fiber optic strands of friendship humming. Or that's what we tell ourselves. The aura of authenticity slipping away seems to be the inherent value of lived experience. Our moments lack validity unless we record and share, shimmer with meaning only when we assure ourselves that others can view the posts.
Selfie is believing...
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