On March 13, 2014, General Colin L. Powell posted a photograph of himself on social media that he had taken using a mirror sixty years earlier. It was accompanied by a caption that read, “Throwback Thursday—I was doing selfies 60 years before you Facebook folks. Eat your heart out Ellen!” Powell was reacting to a group selfie taken by the comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres, who, the month before, had photographed herself with a group of fellow celebrities during the live broadcast of the Academy Awards. The act of taking the photograph, using Samsung’s forthcoming smartphone, was an ingenious example of product placement. And when DeGeneres posted the image to Twitter, then asked viewers to retweet it, her photograph broke the record for the selfie most retweeted in a single hour.

The growing currency of selfies prompted the Oxford English Dictionary to include the word for the first time in its 2013 edition, wherein “selfie” is defined as “A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”1 While Powell’s use of the word to describe his photograph is perhaps technically inaccurate, it reveals a common confusion about the difference between a self-portrait and a selfie. Is an analogue photographic self-portrait that is later scanned and posted onto a social media site an ex post facto selfie? Are these terms interchangeable? Are selfies just a subcategory of self-portraits? Or are self-portraits merely selfies with artistic aspirations (or pretensions)? Powell’s photograph, showing a carefully composed and expressionless young man positioned in the center of the frame, shares little with the casual, often asymmetrical, arms-length composition of selfies, which regularly feature exaggerated facial expressions.

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If the general had posted an image taken in a photo booth, however, his claims to selfie-status might have been stronger. In the 1950s and 1960s, photomats (as photo booths were popularly known) could be found in almost every five-and-dime store and amusement park in the country. Behind the familiar dark curtain, you could let yourself go, shirking off the straitlaced behavioral conventions of postwar America for a few (documented) seconds. Teenagers, especially, were drawn to the narcissistic flash of the photomat, the initial thrill of hamming it up for the camera soon transforming into the delayed pleasure of waiting for the strips or squares, wet and smelling of chemicals, to appear. Squeezing into the tiny cubicle with friends was an excellent way to mark a fun time, and the resulting pictures were prized. Today, these “proto-selfies” can be found in many midcentury family albums.

Even if the selfie can be considered a vernacular subset of the self-portrait genre, self-portraiture, especially in the hands of artists, is often a vastly different enterprise. An artist’s self-portrait can reveal ideas inherent in her (or his) ongoing or future practice. Using her body and a camera, an artist can economically explore formal strategies of presentation that may extend or inform her larger body of work. In many cases, a self-portrait can also be a pertinent autobiographical assertion about the artist—who she is as a human being.
Bruce Nauman’s series of photolithographs Study for Holograms (1970), in which the artist manipulates his face with his hands, could be seen out of context as an arbitrary catalogue of the kind of puerile camera-mugging found in photo-booth pictures, or as a commentary on nineteenth-century scientific studies that documented mental illness through photography. In fact, this work is an ongoing experiment using gestures linked to performances: “I [am] using my body as a piece of material and manipulating it,” Nauman has said. “I think of it as going into the studio and being involved in some activity. Sometimes it works out that the activity involves making something, and sometimes the activity itself is the piece.”3 In his early work in film, video, installation, performance, and sculpture, Nauman tapped into a rich vein of material derived from private performances in which he contorted his body using gesture and movement. He also employed this technique in a later series of holograms.

Much has been written about the first photographic self-portrait, made in October 1840 by Hippolyte Bayard, a pioneer of photography who invented an early version of the direct positive process. When François Arago, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, delayed the announcement of Bayard’s invention so that Louis Daguerre’s and Henry Fox Talbot’s newly developed processes could be presented first, Bayard felt betrayed. His poignant self-portrait, in which he depicts himself as if having drowned, was captioned on the reverse side with a long commentary about the situation leading to his fictional death. This is widely thought to be the first photographic portrait in which the image goes beyond recording the circumstance of the sitting; Bayard’s photograph enters into the realm of metaphor. Christian Boltanski used this same conceit in his 1972 self-portrait Photographie de Christian Boltanski ‘Mort’ 18 Nov 1969. The absurdity of the artist photographing himself as a man who died twenty-three years previously lends the image its irony, pathos, and conceptual heft. Unlike Bayard, Boltanski isn’t concerned with his own psychological state; he is interested instead in the idea of death. Much of his later work incorporates a similar formal language: an out-of-focus face floating on a dark background. For Boltanski, the expressionless face and blurry image denote the posthumous.
In Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), Catherine Opie takes advantage of photography’s ability to suggest a narrative. The artist is shown with her back to the camera; a crude image of a cloud, a house, and two female stick figures has been scored into the flesh between her shoulders. Rather than relying on a title to make her statement, Opie illustrates a vision for a new kind of family and the pain of striving for it. Her identity as an out lesbian is beautifully and uniquely integrated into her self-portrait. Other portraits from this series allude to her connection to the LGBT (and perhaps S/M) community. She has said, “I always make self-portraits when I want to say something really bold.”4
Seventy-five years earlier in France, the artist Lucy Schwob experimented with changing her name before settling on the moniker Claude Cahun. Her new name obscured her gender and ethnicity, allowing her to express herself in poetry, acting,

translation, and photography without necessarily being labeled a Jewish woman. Her self-portraits, made over several decades, reveal her flamboyant personality and fluid gender identity. A follower of Surrealism, Cahun suggests a personal metamorphosis in I.O.U. (Self-Pride) (1929–30). This complex composition, featuring more than a dozen collaged images of faces, parts of faces, drawn body parts and imaginary cross-sections of wombs, addresses the notion of the social mask as one that conceals yet another mask; when it is removed, very little is revealed. A small text written in English at the lower right of the tiny image may give a clue to her ongoing self-discovery: “I am in training, don’t kiss me.”
A self-portrait does not usually require a daring deed, making Yves Klein’s tour de force Leap into the Void (1960) all the more audacious. Created less than a decade after Powell’s self-portrait in the mirror, this illusionistic montaged image seems to show Klein flying out of a second-story window. It was reproduced in a fake broadsheet intended to mimic a Parisian Sunday newspaper that was then distributed to the public, predating the social media distribution of selfies by half a century. Hundreds, if not thousands, of reproductions of this image appeared on newsstands throughout Paris, transforming the work from an object into an event.
While the photograph of Klein leaping from the window onto the street below was not made casually or quickly, it conveys a certain lightness and speed, as well as a spectacular knack for physical comedy. Two separate photographs were made, one showing Klein in mid-air and the other a view of the street, with the help of photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender (who were also among those who caught Klein in a tarpaulin). Negatives of these two photographs were sandwiched together to make a montaged image that is essentially a fiction, yet we suspend our belief of the event in order to be taken into Klein’s imaginary world. One presumes that, for passersby, the broadsheets bearing this distinctive image must have “leapt” off Parisian newsstands as well. Leap into the Void is an important work in the canon of conceptual art, one that Martin Kersels may have unconsciously referred to when making Tossing a Friend (1996). This diptych, a playful pas de deux, shows the large and powerful Kersels throwing a small woman, whose figure is set against blue sky and green foliage. This unmanipulated photograph documents a mid-air performance in which Kersels’s friend manages to defy gravity.

Klein staged many conceptual acts and performances that were photographed or filmed. One of these became the inspiration for a work in Unknown Artist, a series of photographic self-portraits by Warren Neidich (aka the Unknown Artist), who appropriated Klein’s Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zone 5 (1962), inserting an image of himself in the picture. In the original version, Klein throws twenty grams of gold leaf into the Seine while the collector of this conceptual work of art stands nearby. For the Unknown Artist version, Neidich seamlessly grafted his own face onto the body of the collector using a very early version of Photoshop. By inserting his likeness into the art historical narrative via this iconic photograph, Neidich asks us to identify him as “almost famous.” But like the gold leaf disappearing into the river, fame and fortune are fleeting.
Cindy Sherman is by far the most renowned photographer of the twentieth century to use her body as her primary subject. She came of age in the 1970s, when staged photography began to be widely accepted as art. In Sherman’s first body of work, known as the Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), she mines the typology of women in films, casting herself in imaginary but recognizable roles; the portraits are not about her identity, but serve as a critique of female stereotypes.
The Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura explores his fascination with mediated images of women in series of constructed self-portraits. Transcending race and gender, Morimura photographically impersonates particular people: actresses in specific roles, other artists, or famous figures from historical paintings. Situated within ornate tableaux, often elaborately costumed and intricately made up, he transforms himself from a Japanese man into a fictional character, usually female. Subverting the convention of the self-portrait by transforming his likeness into an image of someone very unlike himself, Morimura creates what have been called “hybridized self-portraits.”

The equally elaborate images Gillian Wearing takes of herself lead the viewer in a slightly different direction. Employing painstakingly lifelike masks, she recreates famous self-portraits by other photographers—thus “becoming” Robert Mapplethorpe or Diane Arbus, for example. By contrast, for her photograph Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004), Wearing made a mask from a commercial portrait of her taken when she was a toddler. Her adult eyes peek through the holes of the wax-like mask, creating an image that is an uncanny fusion of two Gillian Wearings: child and adult.
The idea of the past and the present merging into one is contrary to the accepted idea of the photograph, which is traditionally thought to capture a single moment that is always in the past. Complicating that notion are Chino Otsuka and Lorna Simpson, artists whose works span the recent and distant pasts by showing multiple selves in single images. Otsuka works with old family travel photographs that depict her as a child, digitally altering them to create new pictures in which both her younger and contemporary selves appear. Simpson stretches the idea of multiple selves even further, juxtaposing found photographs of a young African American woman taken in the 1950s with images of herself, made up to resemble the other woman. In this way Simpson’s story and those of women who came before her are aligned. As Thomas J. Lax writes, “Simpson created a fictionalized narrative, linking the characters across time through shared comportment and a similar call to the onlooker’s gaze.”5
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In their self-portraits, artists evoke not only who they are as people and what ideas they are exploring, but also who we are as a culture. By presenting themselves, these artists allow us to look beyond them, to gain a deeper understanding of what it means for people to live in a complex world of images. The Audrey and Sydney Irmas collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art includes some of the most compelling self-portraits of the last one hundred and fifty years—each a window into an era. Whereas a selfie seldom reaches beyond its documentary function of presenting the physical
circumstances of its photographer-subject, these self-portraits are not just about their respective creators; they’re about all of us. Ceci n’est pas un selfie.

1 “The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013,” Oxford Dictionaries, November 19, 2013, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013. Emphases added.
2 Some of these expressions, such as “duckface” (lips puckered and extended so as to slim the face and emphasize the cheekbones) have emerged as byproducts of selfies.
3 Bruce Nauman quoted in label text, Study for Holograms (a–e) (Performance in the 1970s: Experiencing the Everyday, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, May 24–November 8, 1998).
4 Catherine Opie, in conversation with Bob Colacello (Art Catalogues, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 20, 2015).
5 Thomas J. Lax, “Momentum: Re-Performance the First Time Around,” in Joan Simon et. al., Lorna Simpson (New York: Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2013), 47.

Interview With Deborah Irmas byPhilanthropy News Digest

Philanthropy News Digest: How did you become interested in photography? And how did your interest lead to your becoming a collector and curator?

Deborah Irmas: As an undergraduate in college, I studied art and then photography briefly, but by the end of my senior year I knew I didn't excel in either discipline. So I went to Boston University for graduate school and studied the history of photography with Carl Chiarenza, who received the first Ph.D. ever awarded in that field. Around that time, I began buying photographs — nineteenth-century ethnographic photos, ambrotypes, et cetera — and also urged my parents to do so, thinking it would be something we could do together. When we were beginning to buy photographs, I asked curator-collector Sam Wagstaff for advice on building the collection, and he said, "Buy from many galleries." In other words, don't get connected to one gallery, which is something novice collectors tend to do. Wagstaff's collection, by the way, eventually ended up at the Getty.

In the 1970s, my parents began to travel often to New York and Europe, and they made it a practice to visit newly established photography galleries. When they found a piece they were interested in buying, they would call to ask my opinion. We soon discovered we had a couple of great self-portraits in our collection, and so we decided to focus our collecting activities in that area. When my parents would visit a gallery, they'd ask to see self-portraits specifically; the dealer would disappear, then return with something fantastic by a well-known photographer. Often when my parents called and mentioned the photographer's name, I'd tell them to buy it without having to see it. Compared to today, the photographs were reasonably priced, but back then spending several hundred to a few thousand dollars was considered lunacy. I remember Man Ray's Rayograms selling for $1,200 in 1974 and thinking it was outrageous.

Philanthropy News Digest: Why did your parents decide to donate their photography collection to LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?

Deborah Irmas: My parents kept their collection at their primary residence, and much of it was on the walls. One day, while they were out of town, they received a call from someone telling them that their home was on fire. As it happened, the house wasn't in danger, but my mother became worried about the collection, which had become a huge responsibility for my parents. Both of them had grown up in Los Angeles, and they decided to give the collection to a public museum there. To them, it was like giving a gift to the city. They never regretted donating the collection to LACMA. For my father, who has since passed away, seeing his collection in the museum and having a book published about it was more exciting than actually owning the photographs. People don't always understand how thrilling it is to know you'll forever be connected with incredible works of art.