Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography
This book is a theoretical examination of the relationship between the face, identity, photography, and temporality, focusing on the temporal episteme of selfie practice.
Claire Raymond investigates how the selfie’s involvement with time and self emerges from capitalist ideologies of identity and time. The book leverages theories from Katharina Pistor, Jacques Lacan, Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, and Hans Belting to explore the ways in which the selfie imposes a dominant ideology on subjectivity by manipulating the affect of time. The selfie is understood in contrast to the self-portrait. Artists discussed include James Tylor, Shelley Niro, Ellen Carey, Graham MacIndoe, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in visual culture, history of photography, and critical theory. It will also appeal to scholars of philosophy and, in particular, of the intersection of aesthetic theory and theories of ontology, epistemology, and temporality.
Claire Raymond is a visiting research associate at Princeton University and a visiting scholar with the department of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Francesca Woodman’s Dark Gaze: The Diazotypes and Other Late Works; Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics; Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South; and Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime. Her research focuses on aesthetics, poetics, and the intersections of cultural trauma and representation.