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Copyright of Ámbitos: Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades is the property of Asociacion de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Actas de Diseño is the property of Facultad de Diseno y Comunicacion, Fundacion Universidad de Palermo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although mental illnesses and personality disorders are largely destigmatized in the contemporary age, some genres, such as self-portraiture and consequently selfies, are still framed in interpretation by diagnostic labeling. One of the disorders that was often taken into reference when approaching self-picturing is narcissism. However, such an approach to the visual genre is limiting its interpretation. This article analyses two sets of self-portrait photographs of a Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who spent some time in psychiatric asylums. This episode divides his work into two phases. In the first period, Munch self-records his various actions in space, while in the second one, he focuses on his face and a static half-a-figure. While the first one is actively reinterpreting the world through the self-image, the second one is centering the self as the world itself. Rather than defining which sets are more narcissistic, this article proposes distinguishing between performative/extravert and contemplative/introvert definitions of self-pictures by defining anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraits. Distinguishing between anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraiture may have impact not only on analysis of Munch's photographic and painterly self-portraits but also on the interpretation of contemporary genre of selfies as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a series of selfies taken by a Celebes Crested Macaque monkey who seized a camera from a human photographer and absconded with it. The monkey's smiling self-portraits appeared in the international press, sparking legal and public controversy around issues of copyright, royalties and fair use of the images. Arguably, the very fact of the debate is indicative of the breakdown of the traditional dichotomies that separate the human from the animal, the natural from the technological. It further calls for a reassessment of photography as a unique act that combines all these aspects and yields surprising definitions of agency and creativity. To this end, the article draws on the Vilém Flusser's philosophy (particularly the concepts of 'apparatus' and 'program') and develops these to examine the ways in which the automation of photography has changed our perceptions of intention, memory and agency to the point that we are all 'monkey photographers.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selfies are a specific, wide-spread form of self-expression on social networking sites. Media, specialists and general discourse have criticized this form of digital visual culture, usually characterized as narcissistic and superficial. Criticism is particularly harsh when selfie-takers are women. In order to question this dismissive conception of women's practices as self-centered and naïve, our paper provides insights into women's motivation, attitudes, experiences and strategies while "doing selfies". Our discussion is based on a 2-year qualitative study on a small sample Canadian women taking and sharing selfies. We argue that "doing selfies" is a carefully reflected practice, involving awareness of social norms of acceptability and visibility for women's bodies, as well as direct and indirect experience of implications of exposure and connection-building online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article presents the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum Bhopal, India, (Tribal Museum) as an especially popular setting and backdrop for selfies and photographic self-portraits by Indian visitors. In general, museums are not considered 'cool' among young people in India. The article discusses why the Tribal Museum is so attractive as a selfie-backdrop and what kind of a relationship this practice establishes between visitors and museum. Thus, the text adopts a different perspective from the prevailing one in literature, which looks at the selfie either (approvingly) as visual 'word-of-mouth' advertising for the museum, or (critically) as a source of danger for the exhibited objects. Although clicking selfies is a frequent, and even dominant practice, the article shows that the visitors feel embarrassed and guilty because of their behaviour, and analyses the reasons for this apparent contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates questions that involve the problematic of the identity in contemporary photographic portraits. Self-portraits are analyzed to discuss the fragility of identities from an artistic production called the Limits of the Daphne, which is composed of a series of appropriate images of the Internet, more specifically selfportraits, selfies. The gesture of self-photographing is approached as an act of identity construction, seeking a theoretical basis in authors who reflect on this theme, such as Annateresa Fabris and Joan Fontcuberta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posting selfies on social networking sites (SNSs) has become an increasingly popular activity among adolescents, especially female adolescents. Given this popularity and relevant studies, the current study aimed to examine the association between selfie-posting on SNSs and self-objectification among Chinese female adolescents and to test whether an imaginary audience could moderate this relationship. A sample of 963 female adolescents aged 12-16 years-old who have an active Qzone (one of the most popular SNS in China) account were recruited to participate in the present study. Participants were asked to complete measures of selfie-posting frequency on SNSs, self-objectification, and imaginary audience ideation. The results revealed that selfie-posting on SNSs was positively associated with self-objectification, and this relation was moderated by imaginary audience ideation. Specifically, the influence of self-objectification on selfie-posting was stronger for young women with higher levels of imaginary audience ideation. These findings add to the extant literature by suggesting that selfie-posting on SNSs may be a new experience of sexual objectification online, which has some theoretical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart photography carries the promise of quality improvement and functionality extension in making aesthetically appealing pictures. In this article, we focus on self-portrait photographs and introduce newmethods that guide a user in how to best pose while taking a selfie. While most of the current solutions use a post processing procedure to beautify a picture, the developed tool enables a novel function of recommending a good look before the photo is captured. Given an input face image, the tool automatically estimates the pose-based aesthetic score, finds the most attractive angle of the face, and suggests how the pose should be adjusted. The recommendation results are determined adaptively to the appearance and initial pose of the input face. We apply a data mining approach to find distinctive, frequent itemsets and association rules from online profile pictures, upon which the aesthetic estimation and pose recommendation methods are developed. A simulated and a real image set are used for experimental evaluation. The results show the proposed aesthetic estimation method can effectively select user-favorable photos. Moreover, the recommendation performance for the vertical adjustment is moderately related to the degree of conformity among the professional photographers' recommendations. This study echoes the trend of instant photo sharing, in which a user takes a picture and then immediately shares it on a social network without engaging in tedious editing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues - be they representational or compositional - alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requires viewers to interpret the image in relation to the technological and sociocutural context in which the photo was taken and shared. In this paper, we consider the technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of the selfie as a visual genre. Central to our discussion is the premise that the selfie is not simply a genre for self-representation, but means of generating various perspectives: that of the selfie maker, the represented visual participant, and the viewer identification. This unique perspective-generating affordance of the selfie is both facilitated and constrained by the various technologies involved in selfie practices. On the one hand, the technological and physical constraints of the smart phone camera give rise to a specific form of “distorted” look which makes certain types of selfie possible. On the other hand, social media platforms facilitate the sharing of selfies, which results in increasingly stylized and creative ways in which perspectives of the self can be represented, negotiated, and, in the case of selfies manipulated via apps, augmented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to previous reports, selfie takers in widely different cultural contexts prefer poses showing the left cheek more than the right cheek. This posing bias may be interpreted as evidence for a right-hemispheric specialization for the expression of facial emotions. However, earlier studies analyzed selfie poses as categorized by human raters, which raises methodological issues in relation to the distinction between frontal and three-quarter poses. Here, we provide converging evidence by analyzing the (extended) selfiecity database which includes automatic assessments of head rotation and of emotional expression. We confirm a culture- and sex-independent left-cheek bias and report stronger expression of negative emotions in selfies showing the left cheek. These results are generally consistent with a psychobiological account of a left cheek bias in self-portraits but reveal possible unexpected facts concerning the relation between side bias and lateralization of emotional expression.

Selfie photography serves not only a traditional role of photographic (self)recording, but also for manoeuvring the space behind one's own back. Unfortunately, as two realities, the unmediated and mediated, human and machine vision, are not matching, there are many accidents of selfie-makers due to the crabwalk. By this, the photographic technology based on the rear-view mirror -- in which objects (may) appear closer than they are -- finally resolves one of the largest tragedies of human self-perception; the inability to see and control the world behind one's back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the phenomenon of the selfie. The author is interested in what this phenomenon is able to say about the human subject and its constitution. Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject is used as a fulcrum to investigate, in particular, his reflections on the gaze and the role it plays in the process of constituting human subjectivity. The author takes one specific 'mirror selfie' and consistently examines various aspects of the gaze in relation to it: the gaze as it constitutes the identity of the subject; the ideological dimension of the gaze and 'ideological visual interpellation'; the gaze as the object-cause of desire; the unbearable inevitability of the gaze; and the monstrous Real dimension of the gaze. The author concludes that new technology, in particular, the new possibilities for self-representation they provide, do not distort the nature of man, but on the contrary only more clearly reveal it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the centre of our interest stand the manifestations of adolescent self-creating endeavours in virtual space of the social media portal called Facebook. Frequent selfphotography (selfie) making, as a pronounced cultural feature of contemporary youth, and regular activity on Facebook handled as tightly connected factors; we propose that youngsters, bearing these attributes, have a different self-esteem than those adolescents who rarely or never take any photographs of themselves. In the first, quantitative part of our research the participants (N=80) filled in the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and a questionnaire containing questions in connection with Facebook-usage (compiled by us). In the qualitative part of the research the participants took part in a half-structured interview, containing questions in connection with selfie-making (also compiled by us). Our hypothesis was not proven by statistical analysis, no connection could be identified between frequent selfie-making and low self-esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to the phenomenon of Internet cats becoming pervasive in Web 2.0, while at the same time digitally shared self-portraits, commonly called “selfies,” also circulate with extremely high frequency. The author tracks the efficacy of sharing selfies for trans/Two Spirit individuals such as artist Kiley May and in trans-centric hashtag campaigns. It shows that trans-animality in digital life can offer sovereign forms of subjectivity and engages response patterns that locate a trans point of regard. Further, it seeks to explain why so many different kinds of cuteness are shared in the intimate superpublics of online trans* communities. Building on classic texts in philosophical cat studies, such as from Jacques Derrida, the concept of the “inappropriate/d other,” and contemporary cuteness theories, the article argues that cute aesthetics provide a sentimental shield, can counter sexual indifference, and often enact a mode of resilience crucial for surviving in cultures that erase the existence of trans people of color. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous analyses suggest that artists prefer poses showing the left side of the subject’s face when composing a portrait, but showing the right side when composing their own self-portrait. There is also some evidence that artists may prefer compositions with key features on the right of the picture. Do these findings generalize to spontaneous, pseudo-artistic productions by individuals with no formal training in painting and art history? To investigate this issue, we tested a sample of 104 British schoolchildren and teenagers (mean age = 13.8 years; 80 females). We analysed posing biases in individual photographic self-portraits (“selfies”) as well as of self-portraits including also the portrait of a friend (“wefies”). Our results document a bias for showing the left cheek in selfies, a bias for placing the selfie-taker on the right in wefies, and a bias for showing two left cheeks over two right cheeks, again in wefies. These biases are reminiscent of what has been reported for selfies in adult non-artists and for portraits and self-portraits by artists in the 16th–18th centuries. Thus, these results provide new evidence in support of a biological basis for side biases in portraits and self-portraits independently of training and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selfie-photography is generally thought of as a cultural mass phenomenon of the early 21st century, inseparably related to the development and triumph of the smartphone with integrated camera. Western culture, however, has been highly familiar with self-depictions since the Renaissance days. Putting the contemporary selfie into this historic context covering more than five centuries of cultural development from Dürer's (1500) famous "Self-Portrait at 28" (also known as "Selbstbildnis im Pelzrock") to today's Instagram galleries allows for identifying central parallels concerning the technical and social antecedents as well as common underlying psychological factors and shared properties of different kinds of self-depiction. The article provides an overview of the types of contemporary photographic selfies and compares them with painted self-portraits. Finally, this historic perspective leads us to the insight that self-portraits as well as selfies are both referring to nothing less than the "conditio humana." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a challenging task for ordinary users to capture selfies with a good scene composition, given the limited freedom to position the camera. Creative hardware (e.g., selfie sticks) and software (e.g., panoramic selfie apps) solutions have been proposed to extend the background coverage of a selife, but to achieve a perfect composition on the spot when the selfie is captured remains to be difficult. In this paper, we propose a system that allows the user to shoot a selfie video by rotating the body first, then produce a final panoramic selfie image with user-guided scene composition as postprocessing. Our key technical contribution is a fully automatic, robust multi-frame segmentation and stitching framework that is tailored towards the special characteristics of selfie images. We analyze the sparse feature points and employ a spatial-temporal optimization for bilayer feature segmentation, which leads to more reliable background alignment than previous image stitching techniques. The sparse classification is then propagated to all pixels to create dense foreground masks for person-background composition. Finally, based on a user-selected foreground position, our system uses content-preserving warping to produce a panoramic seflie with minimal distortion to the face region. Experimental results show that our approach can reliably generate high quality panoramic selfies, while a simple combination of previous image stitching and segmentation approaches often fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the widely popular social phenomenon of “selfies” (self-portraits uploaded and shared in social media) in terms of the observed positive relationship between this individualistic form of social media usage and narcissism. We conducted a cross-lagged analysis of a two-wave, representative panel survey to understand whether narcissists take selfies as an outlet for maintaining their positive self-views (the self-selection hypothesis), or if by taking selfies' users would increase their level of narcissism (the media effect hypothesis). The findings, however, are consistent with both hypotheses, suggesting a self-reinforcement effect: whereas narcissist individuals take selfies more frequently over time, this increase in selfie production raises subsequent levels of narcissism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a method to modify the apparent relative pose and distance between camera and subject given a single portrait photo. Our approach fits a full perspective camera and a parametric 3D head model to the portrait, and then builds a 2D warp in the image plane to approximate the effect of a desired change in 3D. We show that this model is capable of correcting objectionable artifacts such as the large noses sometimes seen in "selfies," or to deliberately bring a distant camera closer to the subject. This framework can also be used to re-pose the subject, as well as to create stereo pairs from an input portrait. We show convincing results on both an existing dataset as well as a new dataset we captured to validate our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the logic of the selfie as a project related to the earliest versions of photography. A historical overview of the "selfie" as an image is given. The author emphasizes her observation that technological limitations of photography's origins in the nineteenth century created photographic self-portraiture. The narcissism of the modern selfie is also discussed, along with the similarity of the daguerreotype portrait with the modern-day selfie.

The article reflects on the term selfie which is a photographic object that initiates the transmission of human feeling in the form of a relationship. It mentions that the word selfie was declared as the 2013 Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries of the University of Oxford. It notes the pathological aspects of selfies wherein selfie enthusiasts are portrayed as vacuous and self-absorbed.

The article focuses on a survey to universities on better understanding of mobile communication culture such as selfie practices in the U.S., China and Great Britain. Topics discussed include them personal digital image production and consumption, photograph exchanges through Snapchat application, and the dialectic communicative nature of selfies.

The article focuses on the sociological analysis of selfies, which are interpreted as a social tool significant in gender and racial identity production and consumption in Texas and New York. Topics discussed include the personal experiences related to selfies, the association between selfie production and consumption, and the policing gender.

The article examines the popular discursive construction of people who take selfies, particularly women. Online commentary on selfies are explored with regard to its regulatory social function and the connection between the discursive construction of taking selfies and negative view on selfie takers. Other topics include selfie as a gendered practice, the differences between the selfie taking practice of men and women, and the interpretation of selfies as narcissistic.

An editorial is presented which discusses the social and psychological implications of the trend of capturing photos of oneself, popularly known as selfies. The author claims that the societal trend implies a sense of loneliness and being alone, and states that the act of taking selfies represents an attempt to recreate a person's reality. Other topics include using selfies to gain sympathy from others, the easy manipulation of photographs, and the omnipresence of photography due to technology.

A correction to the article "What Is Seen Is Who You Are: Are Cues in Selfie Pictures Related to Personality Characteristics?" published in the 2017 issue is presented.