In this article, you can read the editorial from our latest newsletter written by Eidolon-director Róza Tekla Szilágyi, which was sent out on November 7th, 2024. We publish our monthly editor's letters, in which we reflect on recent events, approximately two weeks after the newsletter is out.

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Hello there, 

True to Eidolon fashion, I am currently reading Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die, a book-length essay about photography's unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality published in 2022. There is a passage in this book that I keep thinking back to and want to share with you:

“We are nothing but form-making creatures, each of us a one-off, perpetually knitting inner to outer (while simultaneously unraveling it all) to fashion a kind of idiosyncratic day-to-day, hour-to-hour livability of our given lot. Which then somehow becomes a singular personhood.”

This act of knitting the inner to the outer is something that gives as an opportunity to analyse when thinking about the networked working of self portraits and selfies, the way we represent ourselves through the digital channels available to us. Representation is something we all learn along the way paved with realisations – just think of the viral video of the little girl who unconsciously gives herself a compliment – and internalising how society mirrors us back to ourselves.

And why is the selfie so interesting? Erving Goffmann presented a perspective in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life – in a time when the front-facing cameras were not something that mirrored back our existence on a daily basis. Goffmann described our behaviour and social lifes compared to a performance happening on a stage. Our social life is something close to a performance that happens in two places: the front stage and the backstage. We take our time backstage to rehearse what needs to be performed on the stage so we seem put together, successful and accepted by our peers. Thinking about this logic, what a selfie does is capture that fleeting moment when we are heading towards the stage, have everything rehearsed and shifting to our performing mode. 

I do think that the selfie holds a great significance in our contemporary visual culture and can be a great asset when trying to understand our relationship with ourselves, with our society, with our daily happenings and the political climate around us – and changing our rudimental fleeting look at these photograph to a more contemplative one can gain us important knowledge about our society. 

We will do exactly this next week at the next Eidolon Club event, where Mattie Colquhoun will give a lecture about their latest book titled Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie published by Repeater Books. So come next Wednesday, and quoting Tim Carpenter once again: “It feels lucky to have you here.”

Warm regards,
Róza Tekla Szilágyi
director of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography

You can find all previous editor's letters at this link.