Framing the debatePhotography
Don't hate the woman behind the 'world's worst selfie'
By taking a photo of herself in front of a suicidal figure on the Brooklyn bridge she has become a scapegoat for our worst fears about the modern age
'Is the [New York] Post's amazement and disgust and the internet's agreement that this is 'the worst selfie ever' a simple reaction to a misguided snapshot?'
It's the most selfish "selfie" ever! While police officers tried to talk down a man who was preparing to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, a woman in the park below took out her phone and posed for the type of photograph that recently gave Oxford Dictionaries its word of the year.
She made the cover of the New York Post, which apparently had a reporter or stringer or citizen journalist or busybody in the park at the time. "Selfie-ish!" declares its headline, over a picture of the woman taking her outrageous picture. Wrapped up against the cold and in sunglasses, she wields the phone with a certain practised lightness that suggests an affectless, unengaged and deeply ephemeral exercise – as if she's taking her portrait literally without thought, let alone any feelings one way or the other about the human crisis in the background.
Our culture has plainly got something wrong with it. The selfie craze has got out of hand. It started as a bit of fun but now turns out to be a descent into heartless self-obsession and inane photophilia that turns a perfectly normal-looking individual into a cold Warholian observer of death and disaster, whose only reaction to another's pain is to take a picture of herself in front of the scene she chanced on. And is that a smile she's cracking?
The rogue self-portraitist has been described as a "tourist" in reports. Taking a picture of yourself in front of a suicide drama on the Brooklyn bridge is in fact a perfectly logical extension of modern tourism's obsession with the selfie. People take pictures of themselves wherever they go, from cathedrals to airports to funerals, always the same face grinning at the camera. If you are travelling alone, it's a way to share the experience and report moment by moment on your trip – in this case, look what happened to me in crazy New York! I saw a guy trying to jump off the city's most famous bridge …
And got on to the front of a New York tabloid. Here is the strange twist in this tale of cameras and ethical depravity. The picture that has made the news is not the selfie, but the shot of the selfie being taken: and it's such a crisp, well set-up image, you might almost wonder if the whole thing was a set-up. I am sure it is a genuine record of contemporary mores. However, the choice to make this a story says something in itself about our time. Is the Post's amazement and disgust and the internet's agreement that this is "the worst selfie ever" a simple reaction to a misguided snapshot? It's more than that – for here is the proof of the emotionless, shallow nature of this solipsistic cameraphone craze that everyone was waiting for. The selfie had it coming.
This woman has been held up as a villain of our times when all she did was follow convention. She is, in fact, doing what the culture told her was the right thing. The selfie has been celebrated as a popular artform: it is the socially proper thing to do. Sharing every aspect of your life with your cameraphone is cool, intimate, social and … Oh, wait a minute, it's idiotic, navel-gazing, dehumanising …
Both descriptions are arguably true. Life in the 21st century is inherently ambiguous: not for nothing is Heisenberg a popular name for babies (yeah, Heisenberg was a physicist fascinated by uncertainty before a chemistry teacher turned drugs supplier took the name in the TV programme Breaking Bad). So many contemporary phenomena into which millions throw themselves can be seen as on the one hand modern, democratic, liberating instruments of progress and yet on the other hand, with equal validity, as time-eating cybermats of the apocalypse.
People like the hapless Brooklyn bridge selfie-taker are unlucky enough to be made scapegoats for our deep, perhaps irresolvable confusions about the way we live now. Are we heading for a golden age of instant communication or a digital wasteland? Most of the time we embrace the future with glee, heading for the shops this Christmas to get more gadgets that will create more cultural tropes. But there's this nagging doubt that maybe we're all turning into Andy Warhol's sterile clones. The world's worst selfie is ammunition for everybody's worst fears about the modern age.
This article was amended on 12 December 2013 because "selfie" is Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year, not the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year as the original said.
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