Me, My Selfies, and I

An interesting take on the fragmentation of ourselves as we accumulate selfies over time.

There is far less research on the long-term effect of this behaviour: how taking and sharing selfies over a period of decades affects a person’s perception of aging or time itself. Women around my age—those of us who live on the line between baby Gen X and elder millennial—are watching our identities shift in real time in a way no previous generation has experienced en masse.

This proliferation of images calls to mind the work of Taiwanese artist Annie Wang. In 2001, the day before her due date, Wang took a photograph of herself sitting on her bed, with the words “My Belly / My Baby” written on her bare midriff. That image was the beginning of a series called “The Mother as a Creator,” where, over time, she photographed herself and her son every year or every few years with the previous portrait in the background. Wang has called the resulting mix of images, the most recent of which was taken in 2022, a “time-tunnel” in which the past and present all seem to exist simultaneously.

–Erika Thorkelson writing for The Walrus