It should be no surprise to anyone that many celebrities and politicians don’t actually make their own tweets on Twitter. They either have an assistant, an employee, a small staff, or a PR company, who write and send each message.
It might come as a surprise to some that not every “selfie” posted online is actually a self-portrait taken by that person. A new(?) trend is having someone else shoot one’s “self-portrait” as this provides for more picture possibilities. This probably defeats the concept of a selfie.
Some folks will even use a professional photographer to shoot their selfie. But this is now a portrait rather than a selfie, unless you define “selfie” as being a picture of yourself.
If a professional portrait photographer does a self-portrait, is it a selfie or a portrait? Some of Yousuf Karsh’s most well-known portraits are self-portraits (also here, here and here).
The first known photographic selfie, a daguerreotype, was made in 1839 by US photography enthusiast Robert Cornelius, just several weeks after the daguerreotype was publicly explained by inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre.
Of course, Rembrandt did many selfies in the 1600s, Leonardo da Vinci did selfies in the early 1500s, and Albrecht Durer started doing selfies in the late 1400s when he was a teenager.
By the way, Robert Cornelius went on to open two of the first photo studios in the US. But this “easy” new photo technology allowed lots of other folks to start up photo studios, too. (Sound familiar?). Cornelius gave up photography and went back to his family’s gas and lighting company.
US actor, and “selfie king”, James Franco wrote that selfies are about getting attention because attention is power. He went on to write:
…selfies are avatars: Mini-Me’s that we send out to give others a sense of who we are.
I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, “Hello, this is me.”
Replace “selfie” with “business portrait” and it still holds true. Photography gets attention because photography is about emotion and emotion is power (and here).
Photography is the best way to show who you are. Photography provides authenticity. Your business customers expect your company to have portraits of your key employees.
While a selfie is made for the person in the picture, a business portrait is made for the viewer. You need to say to your customers, “Hello, this is me.”
