This talk was given at the University of South Wales in Cardiff on 18th October 2024. It coincided with a selfie exhibition, also hosted on USW’s campus, which I curated from over 200 submissions. Both events came about at the invitation of my former lecturers, who taught me from 2010-13 when I was a BA(hons) Photographic Art student at the University of Wales, Newport.
It was surreal and bittersweet to be back in Cardiff, a decade since I lived there and some seven or eight years since I visited to work as a technician as part of what was then called Diffusion Festival. I had not missed the rain, but my friends there are a delight. It was a further pleasure to be a part of Ffoto Cymru’s festival programme.
The talk below was delivered predominantly to current students at USW, but was also open to the public. Thanks to those who came from further afield and said hi afterwards. It was a talk I thoroughly enjoyed delivering. Unfortunately, the recording of the lecture was unsuccessful, so here is the full text below, including some of my presentation slides.
Hello. Thank you all for being here. It is really wonderful to be back in Cardiff and to see so many familiar faces. It’s quite emotional actually. I was last here in 2017, busy working behind the scenes of what was then Diffusion Festival, running all over town in a van with Oliver Norcott, probably trying to find a drill. It was a long and intense nine days, but we all went to Popworld when it was all over to have a cathartically weird time. Here’s a selfie!
I came over from London then, when I should have really been writing my Master’s dissertation, which eventually became my first book. Now I’m back again, seven years later, to talk to you about my second one.
Firstly, I’d like to thank Peter Bobby for the invitation, or maybe I should say invitations plural, as it was Peter who first asked me to write something for one of the BA Photography degree show publications back in 2014 – yes, Peter, ten years ago – which was the first essay I had published anywhere as a then-still-recent graduate stepping out from under the photography department’s tutelage. Peter, but also Magali Nougarède, Matt White, Eileen Little, and various other people no longer here were the most supportive tutors anyone could ask for, and I remain hugely indebted to each of you.
South Wales really was where everything started for me, and I think about my time here a lot. When beginning to write this talk, it felt like coming full circle, as I was also thinking about my time in Wales when beginning to write this book. In particular, I vividly remembered a lecture that Magali gave during my first year as a student in nearby Newport, suggesting to us undergraduates that it was likely we’d only ever have one interesting idea, but that we’d find so many ways to explore it. I’m paraphrasing, in a way that probably sounds a little glib – sorry, Magali – but it was important advice; advice that I still often think about because, for me at least, it has born true. I do firmly believe that each of us, in whatever we hope to do, is fated to a problem, a problem that stays with us through an infinite number of permutations, and what I’d like to do today, drawing a line from then to now, is tell you a little about mine.
I first started thinking about narcissism and its relationship to the self back when I was a student. I was taking quite a few selfies back then. This is one I took on Tenby beach in 2010, which I’m showing you for no other reason except that I’ve always liked it. But this is the one that really started it all. It’s a double exposure – the first photo was taken of my face whilst stood in the kitchen of my Newport student house in 2011, and I am merged with a sad-looking bush outside the kitchen door in our backyard. A few years later, in 2015, I took another one, which you may have already seen, as it is included at the start of my new book.
What’s notable, for me at least, is that these photos weren’t really about me at all – or at least not entirely. When I looked back them, whilst starting to write Narcissus in Bloom in lockdown, what I felt they were about or trying to achieve was a way of placing myself quite literally in the world, finding a place within it that felt ‘natural’ maybe, or consciously blurred a nature-culture distinction; not a person standing around things, but melded with them. I wanted to really be a part of something, in a quite deep and entangled way.
On looking them, I also thought back to a project that I made in my first year at uni, which Magali and I were also talking about last night. I don’t have any of the photos anymore — they were taken on negatives I no longer have digital scans of — but I took a series of pictures of myself in various outfits and wigs. I’m an adoptee, and just before I arrived at Newport, I came into possession of a portrait of my birth mum, who I’d never seen before. She was 18 in the photo, just a year younger than I was when I arrived in South Wales, and looked strikingly a lot like I did. That may not come as any surprise to most people looking at photographs of their relatives, but it did to me. Before that moment, I’d never seen anyone who looked like me before, and so what I wrestled with, initially, in a lot of my naïve student work, was a way of making sense of myself, in a way that probably went a little bit further than the average adolescent confusion about the world we live in.
I turned away from selfies when it came to my own degree show, instead affirming a kind of child-like wonder at the world, still something of a goth dressed in all-black, but mostly being enthusiastic about colour and vibrancy in the mundane, finding the silly joy everything, like an alien to this planet, not of terrestrial origin, who hadn’t yet been initiated into the state of things. I think I was still trying to find my way around, as an adoptee with a complicated origin story, but I pointed my camera elsewhere.
Still, one thing I remember from the various degree shows I attended, both as a student and as a graduate, is that there was always at least one selfie project on display, and you could always count on overhearing some disparaging comments made about them. You’d have various other projects, maybe someone using mummy and daddy’s money to photograph a warzone during reading week, or some other grand and arduous adventure into the post-colonial, documented no less beautifully or provocatively, and when I was student, as might still be apparent, it was those sorts of project that I personally had more of a problem with. I think I resented work that performed a kind of certainty about one’s place in the world, and so it seemed wrong to me that so much more cynicism was applied to any student who simply made use of what was most readily available to them, which was themselves.
I’ll also add that this sort of project was often made by a young woman, maybe exploring a nascent feminist politics, or problematising the beauty standards that a medium like photography is so often used to uphold. Perhaps some of the cynicism came precisely from the fact that these projects always carried an uncertainty or sense of doubt within them – an uncertainty that some photographers could probably do with having more of.
In feeling this kind of insecurity, the neat delineation between an individual and the society they are apart of soon becomes more blurred, and for me, as a young photography student indebted a wider community active in this part of the world, it was an understanding of an problematising embeddedness that really interested me. Beyond our various lectures on individual photographers and their influence, what I came away with wasn’t a sense of individual “genius”, as a young artist wanting to strike out on their own like any other acclaimed individual before them, but rather a sense of what Brian Eno famously calls “scenius” – that is, the understanding that any piece of work, no matter the individual name it is published under, is always, in truth, the product of a wider community in which one finds themselves.
For me, as an undergraduate, I found this living with two wonderful housemates, Michael Fitzsimmons and Sara Rejaie. We’ve all gone on to do very different things, not all of them related to photography, but back then, we were inseparable; a veritable bubble of energy. We fed off each other, sharing initial interests, diverging in outcomes. And we drew our energy from a wider community in Newport, the teaching staff at the university, the talks and exhibitions given by visitors who passed through this particularly nurturing matrix of people and places. I remember when my time here was coming to a close, I had my final university assessment at the start of summer in 2013, and when it was over, I cried for a whole day. I didn’t want it to end. It is an experience I still treasure and have hoped to repeat again and again.
But that particular Welsh configuration did end, and though I stuck around here for a little while afterwards, eventually spending a year working as the exhibitions officer at Ffotogallery, I knew I wanted to have that kind of university experience again. Wales was only the beginning, so I took myself off to Goldsmiths in south London, in order to think too much, but knowing that what I really wanted was to think and write more, and in so doing, insert myself into a new community.
I’d been reading the work of Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun at the time, on modernism, dance music, the black radical tradition, the futureshock of jungle, the death of rave. Their work often dealt with this feeling that the time of cultural movements, the continuum of sceniuses that defined the twentieth century, was over. We don’t have scenes anymore, not really, or not in the same way; only a conveyor belt of exemplary individuals, who often only retread the ground of those that had come before them. We were on the other side of the end of art history, and it felt more difficult, in the twenty-first century, to collectively birth the new.
When I returned to university in 2016 as a postgraduate student, this was the fundamental question that we were introduced to by our lecturers. But almost in spite of their pronouncements, I found a nice community there, which nonetheless felt tethered to a peculiar art-world careerism, as if being an artist was enough. But when Mark Fisher died by suicide three months into my Master’s degree, everything changed. I felt a deep and powerful grief, which seemed to come from a contradiction I felt and which we were all suddenly living through together.
Shortly after Mark’s death, someone printed off a dozen copies of this poster and left them strewn around the university, featuring a quotation from Mark’s first book, 2009’s Capitalist Realism:
Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.
This was a hard thing to swallow, especially when read here, on the door to Mark’s old office, as his absence now felt like the one thing we could never change, and for all our collective belief in his work, that was painful. But out of that grief grew a community of people who mourned not only Mark’s death but all of the lost futures that were scattered around us. It was possible, even necessary, to think through this new paradox at the heart of our lives, and it was necessary that we did so together.
My first book, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, grew out of my Master’s dissertation, which I wrote about the trajectory of Mark’s thought at the time of his death; the ideas he was exploring with us, his students; but also a diary I kept in the aftermath, documenting the communal efforts to actualise new futures under the shadow of Mark’s death in 2017, but also Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral defeat, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the pervasive mental health crisis that seemed to be consuming all of us. I was still taking a lot of photos then too, continuing to give in to a documentary impulse to record everything. On the book’s cover, for example, is a photograph of my friends, walking back from a club night we organised in Peckham to celebrate Mark’s life and interest in music on the first anniversary of his death.
When that book was eventually published in March 2020, a week before we all went into lockdown, its reception was admittedly mixed. The version of Fisher that I wrote about was quite different to the one that had installed itself in popular consciousness – immortalised reductively on Wikipedia, as so many things are – and it took a couple more years of work on my part to further rectify his reputation, to unveil not the person he was thought to be but the person he was becoming – something demonstrated by a further collection of Mark’s final lectures, which I put together shortly after Egress came out.
What struck me, however, was that Egress was criticised by some for being too narcissistic, due to the fact that I had written it in the first person, narrating my personal experiences of a collective moment, which felt like the only way to address what had happened at the time. The central point was missed by some; although the book began from personal experience, it was nonetheless oriented towards community, towards a kind of scenius, which was struggling to sustain itself in the face of so much death and devastation.
This is a tension that a lot of my work has explored ever since – arguably the same tension that interested me whilst I was an undergraduate – and it was partly in response to this criticism that I wrote my second book, Narcissus in Bloom. Here the perspective is inverted. If Egress was a book about community written in the first person, this is a book about the individual written in the third person. It is a book that considers how the self, the “I” that we all are to ourselves, is often the starting point from which we set out to explore all that is around us. But it is only ever that: a starting point. When we enter into community, it is the self itself that is so often radically disturbed. When we try to situate ourselves in community with others, we necessarily grow, change, adapt, and become things other to what we once were. It is the greatest and most quotidian experience available to all of us. It is something I first found when I arrived here in South Wales in 2010; it is something I felt when working at Ffotogallery; it is something I found again in London; it is something I am continuing to wrestle with in my PhD, as I consider my personal experiences as an adoptee alongside a politics of family abolition, and the ways in which our families, understood as a kind of biological community, too often limit our imagination with regards to the sorts of community and communal care we can otherwise cultivate and inhabit. In this regard, I have long since accepted that I am fated to a problem, a single idea, that I hope to explore from as many angles as possible – that is, the always-incomplete and fractious co-development of the individual and the collective.
So what does any of this have to do with self-portraits? Fundamentally, I think selfies are interesting precisely because they are images located in this in-between space between self and other, individual and collective, person and culture. This might seem counter-intuitive, since to take a photograph of yourself hardly suggests that you’re thinking about everything else around you, but I think that is only because we’ve gotten used to relying on a kind of faux-intellectual shorthand, borrowed superficially from psychoanalysis and used to represent other received ideas from art history, which don’t actually hold up to much scrutiny, in my opinion. And so, in preparing for this talk, I did find another example of something that activated my pedantic sensibilities on this topic, which was the other exhibition of self-portraits currently on display in this city.
At the National Museum, there is currently an exhibition on display called “The Art of the Selfie”, and at the risk of picking a fight with it, I would like to challenge the way it contextualises itself, if only to suggest that there is another way in which we can think (and maybe should think) about this mode of self-expression.
The explanatory text that accompanies the exhibition at the museum asks a question that is also central to my book: “Is a self-portrait the original selfie?” The text reads:
Throughout history, many artists have used self-portraits as ways to explore their identities and express themselves to the world. Van Gogh painted no fewer than thirty-five self-portraits and so became arguably one of the most recognizable faces in Western art.
But “[s]elf-portraits and selfies are two different things,” they argue, even if “they do have something in common”, which is that
both are used to show who you are as a person. Out of all the ways we document our lives, selfies have become a popular method of self-expression and individualism.
It is this same history of the selfie / self-portrait that I explore in my book, but I take issue with the assumption that selfies and self-portraits are fundamentally different, and even that they are predominantly used to show us who we are as individuals, to the extent that they are primarily a way of expressing individualism as an ideology. This suggests that, when an artist (or anyone) has endeavoured to answer the question of who they are, they have always been certain as to the answer, even that art might itself supply it. But when we actually look at art history, I don’t think this has ever been the case.
Take Vincent Van Gogh, whose centrality within the exhibition is intriguing, as surely there is no artist inaugurated into the Western canon of art history who was less sure of himself. In truth, Van Gogh who is remembered today as an artist misunderstood in his lifetime, precisely because his particular style of representation tears at the fabric of reality as it supposedly appears to us.
When we recognise Van Gogh today as a singular genius with an equally singular vision, we conveniently forget how this is only because of his cultural displacement and malignment. Although he had many peers and a handful of close supporters, he was broadly rejected by an artistic community that had a more rigid view of how the world should be presented to others. Van Gogh’s individualism, in this regard, only emerges from his apparent lack of community.
That most famous self-portrait with the bandaged ear, for example, depicts a man who has torn at his own flesh following a confrontation with a close friend. Here we have an artist who struggled to maintain relationships with those around him, in art and life, and whose sense of himself was so traumatically unsettled and uncertain. Tales of his struggles with mental illness also predominate in his biography, as he spent a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, and what is mental illness, most generally understood, if not an umbrella term for the myriad ways in which we can come to think against ourselves.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, we find Rembrandt, who documented himself more frequently than any other artist before him, painting almost 100 self-portraits during his lifetime. I also write about Rembrandt in my book, and collect postcard reproductions of his selfies as a hobby, following Hervé Guibert, another subject of my book, who did the same. In his earliest self-portraits, Rembrandt captures himself with all the vanity of youth, perhaps making himself a little bit more handsome than he was in reality, but as he grows older, his self-portraits change, with Rembrandt paying far more attention to his mottled flesh, as if he is consulting himself primarily as a piece of meat. These later self-portraits are not personal testaments to the self that he is, but are rather far more impersonal; the self is not so much the subject of these paintings but rather their object.
We also find Francis Bacon, who similarly does not paint his own or other people’s bodies as personal subjects, but rather as objects that endure and are mutated by all kinds of exterior forces. The self is arguably the least important part of Bacon’s paintings in this regard. We might consider how the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze discusses his work in this regard, describing the painter’s interests as a kind of body horror most beautiful. He notes, for example, the “extraordinary agitation” that affects the heads in Bacon’s paintings – an agitation
derived … from the forces of pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation that are exerted on the immobile head. They are like the forces of the cosmos confronting an intergalactic traveller immobile in his capsule. It is as if invisible forces were striking the head from many different angles. The wiped and swept parts of the face here take on a new meaning, because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking.
Deleuze also makes reference to Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and what he finds in each of their works is not a depiction of any individual self, but rather a series of investigations into the self’s deformation. It is in part for this reason that Deleuze, elsewhere in his other work, eventually takes particular interest in the word “individual”, which he sees as totally inapposite for the sense of self imposed on us by modernity.
An individual, as the word’s etymology suggests, is that which is indivisible. It is the One, the unitary thing that cannot be divided. But what I find interesting in the work of each of these artists, as well as so many of the photographs included in our exhibition out in the hall, is that they instead show us how our sense of ourselves as individuals – or rather, following Deleuze, as simply dividuals – is fragmented, under threat, split, never truly whole, always on the cusp of changing.
And beyond both of these exhibitions, who isn’t aware of all the other ways in which we are divided. The selfies we post on social media are taken to give form to a particular online version of ourselves, but today we are divided up between so many other social worlds. We are different people at home, online, at work, with our friends, with our loved ones; we are also divided politically from each other. We are subsumed under an ideology of individualism that is entirely unfit for purpose, that only covers over our dividuated nature. This was the intention behind Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration that there is no such thing as society. “There are individual men and women”, she argued, “and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
We might well ask, “What would Margaret Thatcher have made of Francis Bacon?” In fact, we know the answer to that question. She called him “the man who paints those dreadful pictures.” In this self-portrait, Bacon is certainly a person looking at himself first, but this is not a portrait born of a Thatcherite individualism. Quite the opposite. Bacon’s paintings are dreadful because they dramatize the very thing Thatcher denied – the ways in which we are affected by material forces outside of ourselves, that shape and even deform all that we are. Bacon’s dividuals are, in this sense, strange products of their environment, of society, battered and bruised and deformed by all that assaults a convenient and reductive sense of ourselves. What we are looking at is not a portrait of Francis Bacon, then, but a kind of dynamic cartography of a person impacted by other forces. Do these forces thus become a part of Bacon’s self? Or is the self instead disturbed and distorted? Who or what is actually in this picture? These are the questions the painting asks but does not necessarily answer.
In light of these kinds of art-historical example, it is the contention of my book that we do not know who or what we are, at least not with any lasting certainty. We cannot – and should not – understand ourselves or others as unitary, contained beings. Yes, to invoke the meme, we live in a society… But ours is not a society of fixed identities – with identity again being an interesting word that rests on notions of being identical, of being the same. Ours is rather a society of differences, far from a utopia, but certainly a heterotopia. And I would argue that these are not differences that we need to be resolved, reduced to some sentimental humanism that suggests we are all alike deep down. We are infinitely different from each other, and this is our virtue. Again, somewhat counter-intuitively, it is not our differences that divide us, but rather a logic of individualism that cannot make peace with our divided nature, that rejects the hard work our differences announce to us, differences that make ethical demands upon us, as we seek a solidarity without similarity.
Thinking about all of this is the problem that I personally feel fated to, but again, it’s not just my problem, it’s a problem we all share. And I hope the exhibition outside will go some way towards demonstrating this, initiating certain conversations that I think we’re all eager to have – an eagerness demonstrated by the ubiquity of selfies themselves; a discussion that will only take place properly if we allow ourselves to ignore an ideology of individualism that doesn’t suit us.
Just as Mark Fisher argued that we “must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable”, it is possible for us to begin such a project by starting with ourselves, selves that appear to us so incessantly and so much more strangely than we care to acknowledge, selves that are not necessarily and inevitably one thing or another, but are rather in the progress of undergoing so many contingent becomings.
Change is not impossible, then, as we change every day, and I think our selfies are one way in which we attempt to come to terms with and even document these changes. We shouldn’t dismiss them as exercises in self-obsession, but as something quite other. Because ultimately, we still do not know who we are.
Thank you.
