New journal article:
Alise Tifentale, “Making Sense of the Selfie: Digital Image-Making and Image-Sharing in Social Media,” Scriptus Manet 1, No. 1 (2015): 47–59. ISSN: 2256-0564
This article belongs to a series of related articles and book chapters that I have written in late 2014 and early 2015 about photography in social media and selfies in particular. All of these writings are based in the research project Selfiecity that I co-authored with Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer, Nadav Hochman, and Jay Chow.
Every publication in this series focuses on different aspects of the topic, but all have in common my interest in photography as a form of visual communication and part of visual culture.
The series consists of the following publications (listed here in descending chronological order, according to the time of their writing):
Alise Tifentale, "Art of the Masses: From Kodak Brownie to Instagram," Networking Knowledge (special edition "Be Your Selfie: Identity, Aesthetics and Power in Digital Self-Representation"), Vol 8, No 6 (2015): 1-16. ISSN: 1755-9944
Alise Tifentale and Lev Manovich, “Selfiecity: Exploring Photography and Self-Fashioning in Social Media”, in David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, eds., Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109-122. ISBN 9781137437198
Alise Tifentale, “Making Sense of the Selfie: Digital Image-Making and Image-Sharing in Social Media,” Scriptus Manet 1, No. 1 (2015): 47–59. ISSN: 2256-0564
Alise Tifentale, "The Selfie: Making sense of the 'Masturbation of Self-Image' and the 'Virtual Mini-Me'", Selfiecity.net (2014).
The article "Making sense of the selfie: Digital Image-Making and Image-Sharing in social media" is grounded in an assumption that selfies are a new sub-genre of so-called amateur or vernacular photography, and therefore should be analyzed from the perspective of history of photography. My point of departure in this article is the following:
“A wide range of photographic practices has flourished outside the institutional framework of the art world or commercial photography since the early 1900s, when the availability and ease of use of the Kodak Brownie camera gave rise to a new and massive movement of amateur photography. In literature on history of photography as well as social media, parallel to the term “amateur photography” multiple related terms are in use that often overlap in meaning and at times are used interchangeably, such as vernacular, personal, snapshot, candid or family photography. The term “amateur photography” in this context does not presume any judgment regarding genre, artistic merit of the image or photographer’s skill; it is used to describe all photographic practices that are carried out at leisure, outside any professional framework and without direct material benefit to the maker.”