Mirror selfies only appear to be ordinary people’s disposable snapshots, not manufactured commodities

Evidence

A traditional mirror selfie is quick and easy to take. But what appear to be mirror selfies are now highly produced, an attempt to recreate a gesture that seems to be “authentic,” that appears to be disposable, that looks as if it was produced by the person in the picture and them alone. But once we see there is no mirror, then we also become aware that the conditions of production involved in these images are both far more complex than often acknowledged and almost impossible for the viewer to identify. The image, its inability to fully conceal that which exists beyond its frame, gestures toward the condition of production; this would, we suggest, make these images self-portraits, not selfies. … And even if selfies may have seemed to be “disposable,” we can begin to see that they’ve always involved an elaborate, extensive system of production that remains obscured by the image. This is why selfies are not “vernacular” forms of visual culture. … Because they are well constructed self-portraits, not selfies. Because they are representations of a commodity, a representation that produces a commodity, a commodity indistinguishable from a subject, a commodity indistinguishable from an identity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 90

Categorization

• DEFINE: Draws the influencer labor-theory distinction between selfie (vernacular, disposable) and self-portrait (produced commodity).
• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s labor-theory question: the commodity is the image-self that fuses subject with identity.