Selfies – or rather the popular conception of selfies, as problematic and trivial – demonstrate a connection between photographic practice and social discipline. My research has traced how the discussion of selfies establishes rules for conduct (“don’t take selfies here, or like this”) and identifies subjects with certain qualities (selfie-taker as selfish, narcissistic or insecure), which then legitimises the exclusion and regulation of selfie takers themselves (“I hate people who take selfies”, “selfies should be stopped”). This talk will explore how the devaluing of this specific photographic practice is used in particular to classify and marginalise women, through normalising an association between selfies and those who take them. This talk will also discuss my current research at the Visual Social Media lab, where I have been using an ethnographic approach to consider a variety of photographic sharing practices on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Anne Burns is the Research Associate for the Visual Social Media Lab’s Picturing the Social project at the University of Sheffield. Besides looking at the popular perception of selfies, Anne’s PhD research also considered how involuntary pornography (sometimes called ‘revenge porn’) features a distortion of feminist goals of choice in order to legitimize victims’ humiliation and punishment. Prior to commencing her PhD, Anne was a photography demonstrator at the University of Salford, and worked as a photographer at a high-street portrait studio.