So-called selfies are not actually taken by their subjects

Evidence

One way of understanding selfies is that the act of taking a picture literally serves to produce the self; and to be distinct from self-portraiture, a selfie would need to be taken by the subject represented in the image. But there’s little evidence that what we call selfies are, in fact, photographs taken by the subject in the image—an argument we will develop as we go along. And unlike a selfie, a self-portrait can be anything: a self-portrait is about claiming that this represents me. This is how I see myself, mediated through a particular technical ground. It is an act of poetic invention that may involve appropriating others—images, objects, words, animals, even people—and saying, I have produced a representation that is myself. Thus, the snot-nosed dog might be a self-portrait, but it’s not a selfie. And once we start examining things that we once called “selfies” more closely, we begin to see that there’s an entire system of production intentionally obscured in the fabrication of images of the self, and even understanding what a “self” is today requires not just the foregrounding of identities but this whole system of production. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 73

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Corpocene thesis: the self-as-produced-image requires foregrounding the production system, echoing how corporate personhood obscures the labor behind the firm.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the selfie (necessarily self-taken) from the self-portrait (any claimed representation of the self) — a load-bearing conceptual distinction.