The Stock Selfie: Vernacular Photographs, Commercial Performances and Approximate Lives

• In Event: The Popular Cultures of Digital Photography: Practices, Aesthetics, Institutions

Abstract

Type ‘selfie’ into the website search boxes of Getty Images or Alamy – two major commercial stock photography agencies – and you will receive thousands of responses from their archives: pictures of people taking selfies, or of the selfies they have ostensibly just taken. Deliberately created for sale, and usually employing professional models, these images mimic a vernacular photographic practice and genre which emerged autonomously of the commercial photography industry. This paper uses the appearance of selfies in commercial photography to explore the relationship between the visual and corporeal performativity of the digital lifeworld and its manifestation as saleable images. Is this simply another example of corporate appropriation, or of the purported homology between photography and money as systems of valuation and desire? Or does the generic ‘stock selfie’ reveal intersections between body and image, performance and identification, specificity and generality that are fundamental to the symbolic economy of popular culture?

Bio:
Paul Frosh teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his interests are visual culture, photography theory, cultural production and media aesthetics. His publications include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry and Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (edited with Amit Pincheski).

Author

• Paul Frosh, Hebrew U of Jerusalem