Fan A-Z Challenge
D.) Which of his selfies is your favorite?
Selfies. I have a love-hate relationship with them.
Photographs are stories. if all I see is a face making duck lips or blue steel, that is a boring story. it may look nice but it has no depth. on the other hand, if you do show something in the background but you filter the hell out of your own face in the foreground, you’ve killed the story. don’t kill the story!
Of Richard’s selfies, this is my favorite:
I like this one because he’s showing us a Berlin Station ad adorning the top of a cab, and since he’s in Berlin Station, him being in the pic with the ad is cool. layers. if you look at his clothes and the setting of the selfie, you can see that this was most likely a spur of the moment shot. he has his trusty backpack over his shoulder, very casual clothes (love the sweatshirt!), and it’s taken on a city street in traffic. he most likely touched it up a bit with filters and cropping before he posted it but he didn’t have 15 almost identical shots to choose from (I hope) because he wasn’t trying so hard to impress.
I like several of Richard’s selfies, like the birthday cupcake, and the soccer jersey, and the shot of the Eiffel Tower outside the back of the car window but overall, I just don’t get excited by them. show me something or someone that I’ve never seen or am not expecting.
Give me those crinkles! give me your ‘worse’ side! give me the face I might see if I spotted you picking up your dry cleaning or taking a leisurely walk in the park. that’s the you I want to see.
Nowhere in Particular RA 
Like you, I’m really not keen on selfies… but I like your selection. That black & white spacy-looking one is quite fascinating!
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and now I see that one of the ‘related’ suggestions at the bottom of this post is a selfie of me 🙄 the ‘story’ is that I need to comb my hair.
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😂😂😂
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I’ve been thinking about the proposition that a good selfie should tell a story. I don’t know how I feel about that. Maybe. I do think that many selfie viewers have a desire to see his everyday reality, which is rarely fulfilled in the actual selfies.
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I need more info than a random shot of his face provides. I may like looking at his face but after 2 or 3, I need something more to keep me interested. also, I need something that sets it apart from others in order for it to stick in my mind. I had to google his selfies in preparation for this post b/c I had forgotten about many of them.
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I think the thing is that the story is largely created by the viewer, i.e., there may or may not be other information in the picture, but it’s the interpreter that creates the narrative framework around the picture, not so much the picture creating it, necessarily. I don’t need more info to make up a story in my brain if that’s what I want to do. I would agree that some contextual details are relevant to me, but a lot of selfies undermine those anyway (and he demonstrably has done so himself by posting selfies that weren’t au courant).
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You mentioned the person taking a selfie in church… the worst thing I saw was when I visited the 9/11 memorial in New York City. People were bent backwards across the names taking selfies as they leaned back over the tranquility pool. Yuck.
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societal ideas of respect have definitely changed. it always surprises me when I ride a subway/metro and people don’t offer their seats to those who are less physically able. you have a cast up to your knee and are hobbling around on crutches? sucks to be you 😐
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