Mark Marino, a professor at University of Southern California created this prompt for his students to learn more about race and identity. The prompt was how do our selfies produce and obscure a sense of our identities. For this post, I will be analyzing how sexuality, gender, race, and socioeconomic status are portrayed in my pictures.
Of the five selfies that I have chosen to analyze, the majority of them were taken with one other female. The others were either taken with either my family or with my boyfriend. I think that overall, each of the selfies was an accurate portrayal of both my friends and myself.
Typically, the selfies that I take are after reaching an intended destination, at an event with a group of friends or something that we wanted to show that we’d done. From these selfies, you can see that I enjoy sweets, and being outdoors. Rarely do I take individual selfies. I think that my selfies could be considered ambiguous because I do not have a set group or person that I take selfies with, it tends to be more spontaneous.
In regards to how socio economic status, gender, sexuality and race are portrayed, most of my selfies do tend to be with white, middle class heterosexual people. While I do have friends that are some or none of those qualities, we do not take pictures together quite as often. In all of the pictures we are typically smiling, wearing everyday clothes and in decent lighting.
After having completed this module, I learned that everyone takes and interprets selfies differently. Some people regularly post selfies to Instagram, Facebook, etc. I personally do not like posting pictures of myself individually, so that is not something that I take part in. I much prefer taking pictures with other people, sometimes in selfie fashion. I think that this module was interesting because it helped me to think of selfies in a way that I hadn’t previously. The assignment that Marino had his students do made them analyze who they were taking pictures with, what was the intended focal point of the picture, what kinds of clothing were people wearing and how was the camera angled. I think that this is something that we all subconsciously are aware of when taking the selfie. However, it was interesting to see how these applied to selfies that I had taken.
Here are the 5 pictures that I based these findings on:
