It's not news that Germans more widely value their privacy to a high degree. In my hometown of Sydney, with its world-famous harbour and countless alluring beaches, selfies for social media feel like a fun addition to the everyday. Here, I've noticed distinctly fewer people posing with their phone cameras in public, with selfies seen as self-indulgent. This wasn't the first time I'd heard this since coming to Berlin six months ago. As our group settled back, a friend – who has lived here on and off for years – said, "It's quite funny here in Berlin, it's not really done to take selfies." We laughed and complied, edging together for the shot. She was from Paris, on her first trip to the German capital. "Let's get a selfie!" said a girl at our corner table, extending her arm to capture the group. The bar in Berlin's trendy Kreuzberg neighbourhood was alive with pre-club revellers wrapped up in big coats talking loudly in front of the graffitied mirrors and surreptitiously lighting cigarettes on open candles. Its Art darling! (tell me you hear the sarcasm….It was 01:00, raining and just 2C, but Café Luzia was buzzing. Both depict the female form…but you know…one is fine and the other is not. The art was naked women, studied, viewed, appreciated for the artists representation of the female form…and the forbidden? This is mass produced images for a mass audience. This narrative was then placed into two camps. He is the character, she is the object to help build the story of the character. The female used as a subject and object to tell the narrative in which the male wanted to communicate. So we are left with the narrative of the feminine form from the male point of view, this narrative still exists today….which you will see in advertising.Īnd this narrative is lazy stereotyping. Predominately artists who are studied and whose work hangs in galleries are male and it was actually prohibited for the female to paint the female body as a naked form. This piece organically created itself from my research into the Male Gaze. This led me onto the Collage.īy deconstructing the images and text found in mass culture magazines, printing the iPhone selfies and then constructing new worlds that do not exist…if you want to see the truth, we need to pull apart the Status Quo. How could I create something that was real. The selfie is not real…so how could I make it real. We need to dismantle the belief that being happy in your skin and who you are is not vanity. That having your picture taken is not for vanity, as this belief system is in the place of the idea that only people who think they look good would share a picture of themselves. That people would collect a bank of themselves and their lives. So I’m not here to bash the selfie….you know what I wish for? That more people would take pictures of themselves. I’m happy if I get lots of likes and comments.īecause even through I’m educated in how the media distorts our image of beauty, I still feel the urge to conform to an impossible body type.Īnd addressing these issues over the last 12 month journey of self discovery and the selfie has been a bitter tough pill to swallow. Well that feeling is what I am a fan of for sure.Īnd I’m happy when I am conforming to current beauty standards. For me, believe it or not, i’m not a total fan of creating the selfie…but you know when it happens and you feel good about it. Some people cringe at the selfie…some people LOVE a good selfie. Its not a tangible object, it is merely something that we as a culture has developed since the birth of the camera phone, which then led to social media being the platform it is today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |