Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie
Routledge History of Photography Series

This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context.

This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture?both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture.

This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.

Introduction. The Selfie as Visual Culture: A Methodological Quandary

Derek Conrad Murray

1. Counter-Selfies and the Real Subsumption of Society

Grant Bollmer

2. Self-Portraiture and Self Performance

Katherine Guinness

3. Proliferating Identity: Trans Selfies as Contemporary Art

Ace Lehner

4. The Evolution of the Selfie: Influencers, Feminism and Visual Culture

Derek Conrad Murray

5. How Selfies Think: The Cognitive Dimensions of Digital Photography

Kyle Parry

6. Domestic Snapshots: Female Self-Imaging Practices Then and Now

Soraya Murray

7. The Selfie in Consumer Culture

Jonathan Schroeder

8. Selfie Narcissism, Consumerism and the Pathologizing of Women

Derek Conrad Murray

Derek Conrad Murray is a Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz.