Selfies allow black women to say we are here, and we are beautiful

When others recognize you being present in a world of wonder, you feel the joy of existence. That’s why we take selfies. They are pixelated bits of confection to remind us that we are all interconnected, no matter how we try to tear each other apart. 

Our societies celebrate a singular definition of beauty to the exclusion of others. I think of this when I see stray posts of young women of color – black girls, dark skin girls – sharing their carefree moments, perfect and imperfect. Resolution with dark skin in dark light still is a challenge for smartphone cameras, yet I adore how adaptive and inventive we are with that limitation. 

We fiddle with Instagram filters, use other photo apps to adjust light curves values that render us magical, mysterious – the center in our own stories – with beauty, drama, and complexity. These photo apps are teaching us to see ourselves anew and across multiple situations. While the mainstream may not yet reflect a wide, true and constructed representation of people of color, we’re creating space for that existence in the cyber world. We’re cultivating a vernacular to understand our images beyond stilted paradigms. 

I’d imagine that’s what over a billion posts under the hashtag “selfie” on Instagram show. There’s community in this generation selfies. In the last four years, we’ve witnessed an explosion of shareable images chronicling our highs, lows and sillies alone or standing with others. We’ve seen how communal selfies can be. It’s a misnomer to describe this act with the prefix self – the group self portrait is about so much more than just the individual.

As a photographer, I’m camera shy. I hid behind the camera for so many years, documenting moments between friends and family, before I realized that I was missing from the picture. The first selfie I ever took was in the exotic nation of England in 2002. I was sitting on the side of the Thames in Southwark after a resplendent afternoon, wandering the galleries of London’s Tate Modern. I turned the analogue camera on myself and adjusted the focus in reverse. I would have to wait until I processed the film in a rented darkroom lab to finally see the results. 

Narcissus, certainly, would relish in the era of selfies had he survived the drowning. And Narcissus’ fate will always remain cautionary parable. There are limits to self love before it morphs into self absorption or worse. It would be years later before I’d embrace digital cameras. One of my earliest digital selfie shots was taken in the forest foothills of the Himalayas. Surrounded by rolling clouds, I wanted to locate myself in the immense beauty, and capture myself Mona Lisa smizing.

Still, Rembrandt’s self portraits are as narrative as they are navel gazing. A hyper heightened sense of self emerges in them. I’m grateful they exist. Van Gogh, in his wild brush strokes, rendered himself imperfect and human, beyond vanity. Frida Kahlo’s self portraiture chronicled complex feminine interiority. Frida holding Frida’s hand. Frida’s heart connected to Frida’s heart. So beautiful and painful, Kahlo’s self portraits explain the passing moments of joy, pain, solitude and self love that I’d never be able to articulate.

I also think of Vivian Maier, a reclusive Chicago nanny whose vast photo archive was uncovered in a fluke by a real estate broker turned filmmaker. She took countless self portraits during her wanderings in the 1950s and1960s. They are compelling images – a salvo to a curious mind. Maier was cataloging her world. Her fierce glare in some photos fascinate, they are guileless and penetrating.

When I think of what led me to photograph self portraits, it started out with a benign desire to capture happy, silly moments. Later, it evolved to idle curiosity, an adventurous desire to see every incarnation of myself living and engaging in the world with silly faces and inspired looks. My own movie. I was feeling myself. I could do what I felt most photographers could not do: I could capture myself as how I saw myself.