I took my first selfie at the age of seventeen (or thereabouts) – almost forty years ago. I had been gifted a small pocket camera. It seemed like a little magical box. I took immense joy from every experimental image I captured with that curious little artefact.
Graeme Compton ‘First Selfie’, photo, circa 1984
I took the selfie out of curiosity. I had no sense of how it would turn out. I made no effort at composition. I just aimed the camera approximately at my face and pressed the button. The shutter clicked.
And there I am.
Or am I?
Is The Selfie proof of one’s existence?
The young lad who took that photo ceased to exist even as the camera mechanism made the air particles in his ear vibrate and send a message to the auditory receptors of his brain. Certainly, by now, forty years hence, he is long, long, gone, his cellular structure lost to time and events; only the unbreakable code of his DNA holding together an aging facsimile of his identity.
Over time, I have found myself taking photographic selfies, drawing self portraits, even painting a self portrait, albeit in a slightly surreal style. This has not been because of a fascination with self. Occasionally it has been because I simply could not afford to pay a model in order to study an idea. At other times, it has been the best way to display to potential audience what I have been up to in my creative space.
Graeme Compton ‘Dragon’s eye’, photo, 2024
Often enough, the selfies have been taken out of the same sense of curiosity that my younger self entertained.
Who is this creature? What is it about? I am fascinated by the corporeal embodiment that carries my cognisance and consciousness about. What a strange and wonderful thing it is! And we all have one!
A body. A face. A functional transport for our core being. A physical transmission system for our consciousness. A sensory organ which feeds and fires our cerebral evolution.
A self portrait seems to be a register of our own curiosity about this incredible form we inhabit.
Ultimately, the self portrait becomes a static preservation of a memory of a moment. If the moment is staged, then the record is purely academic; tick the box, this task has been completed. If the recorded event is a spontaneous facet of the continuum of life’s course, then mayhap it is imbued with more meaning.
In every recorded life event – a party, a wedding, games with visitors, a quiet moment between friends, an intimate moment between lovers – there is contained a gem of memory, with as many facets as can be recalled about that moment and the moments surrounding it.
A solo selfie, I have found, reminds me of a set of circumstances, or, as I noted above, a task completed, or an idea explored. There is rarely any deep emotional value to it. In itself, it is a creative exploration. An idea.
A group photo, or a photo with a friend, spurs memories of conversations, shared experiences, laughter, tears, a journey taken in company. There is a richness to the shared experience which a key image can unlock.
Shared memories are multi-layered, interconnected, partly known and understood by one, and partly by another. Even if one of the sharers no longer exists in this state of being, the remaining reminiscent can recall a vast web of incident, event, response, perception, reaction, and every other facet of the past. One can gaze upon the motionless pool of the other who is gone and recall the stream of their existence.
Here, then, are two apparent proofs of our existence, at least, in our awareness of the passing moments: the ever-vanishing present; and, our memory of these moments, the eternally vanished past.
There is another facet of the selfie, gaining prominence with the advent of micro and digital technology: the world stage and the world audience.
Every individual now has the potential to take a selfie and show it to millions of others. Surely this is proof of our existence? If each of us can show all of the others we are here, we are substantial beyond self, we are loaded into the mass memory of the organic sapien super mind. We are even loaded into the mass memory of the electronic virtual mind, the cyber cloud.
Recorded for all time. Perhaps. But certainly momentarily seen in many places.
This mutual selfie, this mass state of recognition of each individual, is an explosion of social play. We can dress our selfie up in all of the conceptual states thus far invented by the sapien mind to show our self to the world.
We are the reporter, the athlete, the comedian, the inventor, the tradie, the politician, the philosopher, the guru, the pole dancer, the porn star, the parent, the child prodigie, the tuber, the rapper, the reader, the author, the environmentalist, the diver, the climber, the leveller, the influencer – every facet of cultural and social invention, the fabric of our conceptual reality, is brought to life by individuals taking selfies, either still, or video.
Graeme Compton ‘Chess with Yorick’, photo, 2020
Is it truth? Or imagination? Or fantasy which becomes truth through repetition and recognition?
Conceptualisation is one of the wonderful tricks of the sapien mind which keeps us amused and interested, gives us colour and additional meaning for this impermanent moment. It is the creative genius of one mind’s epiphany, quantum-circulated, memorised and practised by the mass mind. Every genius, every original source, is the product of its environment, and its thought, its invention, is shared once again into its environment, multiplied, transmogrified, varied and evolved, through constant cogitation.
Thus, the imaginative theories of Einstein become the real understandings of the present scientific community and our communal mind evolves.
Or, thus, the ravings of a zealot become the motivator of the mirror neurons of millions for a momentary violent era and millions of minds are lost; only to have history cast the zealot’s principles as radically unacceptable by the surviving generations.
It ought to be surprising that, given the ordinariness now of shared self promotion through social media and devices, a transcendant idea from a culturally prominent self can exist. With so many folk showing their talent and wit, how does a star still rise from the milieu? Inspiration must naturally coalesce in one being with such intense focus that the transcendence of that individual in the community mind is undeniable.
At present, where the technology is available, every one of us can record our self in any given moment, either (relatively) natural, or posed.
And the moment we do this with the intention of sharing the image, the selfie extends beyond self and becomes a part of the community.
The moment we seek an audience, the moment we give our creation to an other, or to others, we are no longer ‘self’. A shared mind becomes aware of this self and this self is transformed into a shared self.
Graeme Compton ‘Painting Paul – the Completion of Abbey Road Elephantised (after McCartney and MacMillan), photo, 2021
It is such a tempting way to share our self, that even those of us who are introverted by nature find ourselves compelled to join in.
We are recognised for our similarities, our sameness, and others empathise.
Our beautiful sixth sense – empathy – gleans every brilliant recognisable micron of identity from the image, wanting and needing to relate to it.
And then the divisive, discriminative self celebrates or castigates the differences, depending on the state of mind of the receiver.
So, we communicate. Selfie to selfie. We commune. Individual to individual, becoming an electronic mass of individuals.
Interesting, isn’t it? How the word ‘individual’ begins with ‘I’ and ends with ‘dual’.
For as long as I can remember, the idea of the individual has been promoted in some way, shape or form. The self is held to be significant. Too significant, at times, even to the point where some voices recommend that you only think about yourself, without concern or regard for others. Even with such an enticing ethos of selfishness and self-centric thought proffered to us in multiple platitudinous memes, many of us do not succumb to the narcissistic state, but recognise our need to share with others, to help others, to give others health and happiness.
There are those who say that altruism exists in everyone, that we are born loving beings, that we all wish to be loved and are capable of kindness to one another. Undeniably, many of us are such beings.
In any case, our shared existence and our common origin is irrefutable. We are connected, related, on a cellular level and we are bound to breath the same atmosphere. We move about experiencing the same laws of physics. We must endure the same irradiation by our life-giving, life-destroying sun and risk the same volatile forces of nature which shape and reshape our home-world. The tangible and intangible effects of the universe upon our beings is the same for all of us.
The microcosm of our own individual circumstance, familial and social, connects us to our fellows through a communal need for survival, for familiarity, for remembrance, for support, for inspiration, for learning, for evolution. Each individual feels this and the community experiences it.
Rembrandt had an affection for self portraiture. He painted, sketched and etched in the vicinity of one hundred portraits of himself in various modes and moods, dressed up and dressed down, each portrait telling a story, as his honest brush cast his expression at every stage of his life’s journey, in perpetuum for future other selves to observe. What did the elder Rembrandt think to himself as he observed the younger Rembrandt? Did he ponder the previous incarnation’s lack of knowledge? Did he ponder his ill-fated decisions? Did he wonder at his own genius? Or curse his lack of talent, as so many artist’s tend to do. Perhaps his ego forbad this last contemplation.
Did he realise how many future generations of folk would stand before his portraits and wonder?
Graeme Compton ‘Elephandt Selfie (after Rembrandt")’, photo of original artwork by Graeme Compton, digitally displayed as an envisioned page in a book, a tongue-in-cheek homage to Rembrandt, 2016
I stood before a Rembrandt self portrait in the first weeks of 2018, a fortunate visitor to a wonderful display of Dutch golden age artworks in the Gallery of NSW. I stood meditating on it for as long as possible, without interrupting the view of others; by some coincidence, no one else seemed to wish to look upon it for a length of time. As I peered at the painting, I could feel each brush stroke, feel the movement of the master’s arm, feel the angle of his wrist, the poise of his body, the pliablity of the bristles, the viscosity of the paint, thick, creamy, shaped by each brisk, deft executive touch. I felt that I inhabited his being, stood in the space he had stood in, as he daubed away at the canvas.
Such a tale did the ancient paint tell me, in its eloquent texture, its meticulous language.
Rembrandt, in recording himself in such a fashion had done more than merely snap a shutter open and closed, to capture an image; he had recorded the living movements of his body, the cognitive stream of his mind; he had left evidence of his being in the shape of his work.
He had painted a self portrait and, in the same moment, stepped beyond self, transmitting the code of his existence into every sentient creature who came to stand before his picture.
The universe, in all its rich mystery, is known to us, as it exists within us. We all share that same origin and are, therefore, all the same being.
There is no ‘I’ and by extension, perhaps, there is no ‘we’.
However, in every moment that we are aware, in every moment that our conscious mind observes and records and remembers, there is an ‘I’ and a ‘we’; and they are one and the same.
We are all, in this state of being, impermanent, though the stuff we are made of will surely pass on into its next state; and possibly our core being, our consciousness, will pass on into its next state of existence, too. Yet, this being in itself, this being that is ‘I’, that is ‘we’, is precious, because it is ephemeral.
We are aware, therefore we exist; and we each of us share the proof of that with each other.
As much as we share it with each other in the form of the creative and ubiquitous selfie.
May your day be creative,
Graeme
Graeme Compton ‘Beggar on the platter’, acrylic on canvas, self portrait with mannequins, 2013