The selfie as genre collapses subject, artist, and mediated distance into proximity

Evidence

As the first book of selfies—what one critic deemed “a new kind of autobiography,” while another called it “a nail in the coffin for artistic photography”—Selfish puts pressure on the medium of photography and of the artbook, as well as on art criticism: it is everything, to everybody, and nobody can dress it down because it has already called itself selfish. The nature of the selfie as genre strips the medium of photography: its perspective can only ever be close; its framing can only ever be distorted by the conventional wide-angle phone lens and off-centering; its subject and artist collapse into one; its content a face, perhaps an ass; its composition pasted to Kim’s four-rule formula (“Hold your phone high; know your angle; know your lighting; and no duckface!”). — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 330

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely names the formal features of the selfie genre that embody immediacy (close perspective, distorted framing, collapsed subject/artist), giving the reader a precise model to identify the aesthetic elsewhere.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s account of how postmodern genres hollow out aesthetic distinction and to the reader’s working concept of mediation collapsing into instantaneity.