Most images presented as selfies are staged pseudo-selfies

Evidence

Yet selfies are dying out today—or, more accurately, are dying in such a way that makes it clear they never existed in any meaningful sense. What we often see online, images that seem to be selfies, are anything but. They are instead artificial selfies designed to look as if they are selfies. … These fake selfies reveal how, while the practices of self-portraiture have existed and will endure, remade, reinvented subtly depending on the material support of the image, the selfie, that image of oneself taken at arm’s length, is dying a death so strange that it calls into question its very existence as a distinct kind of image. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 66

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth asking how the pseudo-selfie parallels the influencer: whether the persona itself is an artificial version of an authentic performance.
• SHARE: The ‘no-mirror mirror selfie’ staged by another camera/photographer is a precise knowing detail for anyone studying image aesthetics.