Me, My Self and the Photographic Eye

The Spectre of Narcissism

I wondered whether doing a project on self portraits of Me was at all narcissistic. If I am taking as my tenet "All photography is exploitative and voyeuristic" then I need to consider if self portraiture if in fact a form of auto-voyeurism. Am I being incredibly conceited here, or just the opposite?

In her MA thesis 'Girl Before a Mirror', Risa Horowitz offers two definitions of narcissism:

"One the one hand, there exists the popular notion of narcissism. This notion assumes that if one is dealing with issues of the self, particularly representations of the self, one is behaving in a self absorbed and isolated manner. This assumption implies a certain arrogance of personality in the narcissist base don imagined self-love and self-pride... On the other hand, there is the notion of narcissism that assumes the individual to be void of self-identity, relying on reception and response by the external world to gain a sense of individuality. These narcissist lack "inner experience. They must look to another person's reacti0on to gain any sense of themselves... one must hold a mirror up to them."[1][2]

There must be some reason beyond the reaches of my layman's psychology for people to feel the need to record themselves in visible, tangible form. If I am to be labelled narcissistic, then of the two types referred to above, I am inclined to put myself in the second, rather than the first category.

Research by Carey M Nolan on the use of 'Auto-Photography as a Research Practice: Identity and Self-Esteem' [3] has concluded that allowing people to take photographs to illustrate a point (for research purposes, in this instance, but the findings can be extrapolated) gives them a greater sense of self-esteem (and thus, arguably, sense of self) than they would have gained from written or verbal communications about themselves. Self portraiture per se was not specifically required in this research project, but the nature of the images the subjects were producing were all autobiographical and hence, to a large extent, self-portraits.

URLs and References

[1] Horowitz, R. Girl Before a Mirror.

[2] Final sentence quoted in [1] is from Gendlin, E. A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism. Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia and Depression. Ed David Michael Levin. New York /university Press 1987.

[3]Noland, C. M. (2006). Auto-photography as research practice: Identity and self-esteem research. Journal of Research Practice, 2(1), Article M1.