As a general rule, I eschew selfies. At best, I regard them as unnecessary—will I really remember this vista better if I insert my face into it? At worst, they feel narcissistic, a reminder that the world isn’t the world unless I’ve marked my place on it, as if the moment I want to capture is worth preserving only if I can prove it happened. Do people look through their old selfies for that glimmer of remembrance—yes, this happened—or are selfies all in the service of now? Look where I am now. Look at me now.
I can’t look back on my old selfies without registering how old I’ve gotten. In Torben Jensen’s Carl Th. Dreyer—My Métier, he conducts new interviews with Dreyer’s leading men and ladies, juxtaposing their aged faces and bodies with their younger, cinematic selves. I searched the screen, trying to bridge features—eyes, hands, mannering—from younger to older, but even so, those connections felt tenuous, as if these were completely different people. I wonder if they recognized themselves, or if, as we grow older, we inevitably become strangers to ourselves.
In “Everyday,” photographer Noah Kalina compiles, into a single video, the selfies he’s taken of himself since January 2000, an extended riff on Ahree Lee’s “Me.” In “Everyday,” we can see the tiny permutations of age, of exhaustion, of lifestyle changes, as backgrounds shift, as hair elongates and shortens, as wrinkles deepen. Perhaps this is the ‘frog boil’ effect: when presented with ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos, we jump out of the boiling water immediately, scalded; when presented with incremental changes, we don’t recognize the increasing ache in the bones as we stew, the compulsion to yell at strange children crossing out lawn.
The last selfie I remember taking was along the Guayas River in Guayaquil, Ecuador,. Matthew and I were on the Ferris wheel, despite his fear of heights and despite my minor case of conjunctivitis. From our capsule, we could see the whole of the city: the dense crowds and shiny attractions of the river walk; the cargo ships crawling along the muddy water, the colorful scrum of houses climbing up the hill, skewered throughout by skeletal telecommunication towers.
Then, in our pod, Matthew and I crammed together, trying to frame our faces against the landscape outside the cloudy glass. We tried again and again: in one, the setting sun washed us out; in another, we only got sky; in a third, our heads tilted oddly. In all of them, my left eye is almost shut. And I realize: I don’t want to see my face. I can almost recognize the stranger in the picture, the facial features, the salt-and-pepper hair, the glasses—even the squinted, crusty eye. Even though he smiles, I suspect the stranger wants me to tell me something, to remember something, but I’m now too far away to hear him.