The apparent mirror selfie is often itself a constructed image

Evidence

The no-mirror mirror selfie follows how literary theorist Sianne Ngai theorizes the “gimmick.” A gimmick is a technique that reveals a simultaneous deficiency and excess of labor in production, something that “seems too expensive or too cheap,” where “the technology behind it is too new or too old.” In a traditional mirror selfie, the phone in the image is the source of the image itself. In the images Del Toro identifies, the subject in the image either has someone else take their photo or they set up a second camera on a tripod in front of them to capture their image. We can see this fabrication at work in fashion blogger Léa-Elisabeth’s Instagram post taken on a city street. This would seem to be a traditional “mirror selfie.” Léa-Elisabeth and a friend are looking at their phone, looking at what we, the viewers, assume to also be Léa-Elisabeth and her friend as they take a picture in a mirror. But the context of this image undermines the possibility that what we might presume we see is even possible. Were a wall-sized mirror placed out on the street, it most certainly wouldn’t be flawlessly clean. This image was clearly taken by another photographer or another camera—not the camera in the photo. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 87