Want to become a licensed expert on selfie You can head to London, where a college is offering a photography course titled, ‘The Art of Self Portraiture’. Is the selfie evolving into an art form
Still looking for better ways to accomplish that perfect selfie almost every trigger-happy smartphone owner around you seems in dire pursuit of Just above a £100 and a month-long trip to London’s Covent Garden might be the next best stop along your quest. City Lit, an adult education college located there, is offering a photography course titled “The Art of Self Portraiture” that teaches you, quite simply, the art of clicking selfies with a DSLR camera in tow.
Could selfies, then, possibly be moving towards evolving into an art form in their own right
“Why not ” asks fashion photographer Vikram Bawa. “I think it’ll be fun to see what people will do with themselves as their own subjects. The idea might sound funny to a layman but when you explore it within the art space, from the point of view of self-expression or in terms of capturing and translating a culture in progress, it is fantastic. Twenty years down the line we’ll be talking about the years we’re living in right now as years when everyone was doing selfies. We tend to frown on a lot of things that actually go on to define how our culture takes shape with time, and this might just be one of them.”
Delhi-based photographer Prateek Biswas points out that self-portraits aren’t a new phenomenon in photography to begin with. “The difference, I think, lies in the fact that they were restricted almost entirely to professional photographers across the ages in a way that other kinds of photography like still life or portraits weren’t. Anyone with a camera has shot the latter for sure in their regular lives and now self-portraiture has also found its way to them in the form of selfies. That a discipline might be built around them to study their technical aspect is something I see as a positive development, another addition to the evolution of photography itself as an art form. My only apprehension is that it needs to be looked into seriously and truly studied rather than simply formulated into a means of making money by cashing in on a transient trend,” he feels.
The course on offer posits itself as a serious affair indeed, complete with lectures, seminars, presentations and class discussions. Applicants are required to bring their own DSLR cameras for all four sessions and also possess basic knowledge of camera functions including ISO, white balance and shutter speed. Celebrity photographer Luv Israni sees this as being in line with another parallel movement in the larger discipline of photography. He observes, “There is a greater urge to enter this field on the part of younger, more dynamic minds today and self-portraiture is probably the only area left that has remained relatively unexplored so far, for them to venture into. Today, anyone and everyone can be a photographer. Also, from a more technical point of view, every face has a particular angle that works for it.
Through selfies, people have actually been able to figure out what angle works best for them in a way that sometimes even professional photographers haven’t been able to. In this regard, selfie photography can even have an edge over professional photography and I think it’s a brilliant area to explore and evolve an art form out of.”
For Delhi-based photographer Sakshi Kumar, self-portraiture already is an art form but it is one that requires more than simply technical perfection to really explore. “When I began my own career in photography, my work mostly consisted of self-portraits. I can’t write or draw well, and so found my release and sanity in self-expression through photographs. For me, self-portraiture is therefore more about looking into myself than about technical perfection that can actually be taught. The way I see it, what you need is more time alone with yourself to try and capture some essence of you rather than the angle of your face or your features. A good self-portrait should concentrate on that essence. When we’re doing commercial work, of course, technical elements have to be perfect like white balance, saturation and aperture and these aspects do need to be taught. But I would say that after learning these basics, you should look deeper into yourself and find your own individual expression.
I would love to see the results of that,” she concludes.
