Me, my selfie and I

Nothing annoyed my high school English teacher more than the phrase “Me, Myself and I”, which one or other of her teenagers fashionably used to convey the information that she alone would be responsible for carrying out some task.

I’m sure the teacher had a suitable technical term for the mistake, but unfortunately I remember nothing about high school English except vowels, consonants and Things Fall Apart.

However, the self-absorbed phrase accurately depicts the direction that modern photography is taking.

This came home to me when I recently took a local flight. As I boarded the plane using the mobile staircase, the queue in front of me suddenly came to a complete standstill.

The embarking passengers had paused to allow a plain-looking gentleman snap a self-portrait using his tablet.

The photographic session did not stop there. He hugged his tablet to himself as he squeezed into his window seat which, unfortunately, was adjacent to mine. Every few minutes he stretched out his arm (forcing me and the gentleman seated in the aisle seat to practically fall into the aisle) and took yet another picture of himself.

The age of the ‘selfie-sh’ When he wasn’t taking selfies, he spent the rest of the time scrolling through an album of self-portraits on his tablet and deleting any that did not meet his exacting standards.

I wondered about the eventual fate of this gallery. Would he post them to his Facebook page to update his adoring fans with a moment by moment record of his journey?

Would he print them out and plaster them all over his walls? Would they be carefully arranged into a slide show or photo album to amaze family, friends or workmates? Or would they remain on his tablet for his own admiration and enjoyment?

Before the age of the “selfie” (or the “selfishie”, as I call it, because it combines self-love with a taint of fishy-ness) people who wanted a picture of themselves had to hand over their apparatus, usually to a perfect stranger.

I often wondered why no one who was given the task of recording a stranger ever ran off with the Nikon D810 (or other valuable camera that had just been handed to them) but instead patiently took snaps as per instructions until the client was as satisfied that their presence at some world-famous monument had been captured with an accuracy and authenticity beyond the ability of any Thomases of their acquaintance.

I suppose that I was not the only one to recognise the risks of handing over your camera. Soon, time-delay cameras came into the market. Combined with a tripod these cameras enabled the photographer to leap into the frame just in time for the photographic flash. However, they did not solve the problem of leaving the camera unattended.

More recently, someone has invented something called a “selfie-stick” that enables the photographer to hold the camera at sufficient distance to enable more of their body to get into the frame – and to preclude the need for the outstretched arm (and collapsing neighbours).

No sooner had I learned about this handy stick than I began to notice tens of tourists posing before their sticks.

It was a disturbing sight. This is clearly The Age of Self. We each live in a self-sufficient bubble, each prepared to do everything for herself.  It used to be better-o (okay, even I watch Nollywood Soaps) to be hetero.

Then it was okay to be gay. Now it is all right to be tight. Have selfie-stick, will travel. Here we are in a world where billions of people are totally connected yet we need technology to help people take photographs while going on holiday by themselves! As Cinderella said when she left her roll of traditional film for development, “Perhaps someday my prints will come...”

Get the self out of your photography this Saturday.

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