ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates two binary relations to theorize the visual politics of selfies: figure and ground, transparency, and obfuscation. As Katherine Guinness and I have argued previously, selfies should be theorized as comprising a figure-ground relation in which a “self” is rendered distinct from a “background.” This occurs both in the experience of taking a picture and in the image itself, where the figure is located in front of its background. The politics of this distinction are ambivalent, though the phenomenology of taking a selfie requires this differentiation. As I argue here, the relational politics of figure and ground are made more overt when contrasting selfies with drone photography, which locates a figure within—and as a part of—a larger environment. The second binary, transparency-obfuscation, intersects with and remakes the figure-ground relationship. It helps theorize what a number of artists are doing to challenge a visual culture of surveillance that demands complete visibility and—often through computer-aided vision—“transparently” discerns knowledge of interior states from visible evidence of facial expression. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Jemima Wymen, and Adam Harvey, among others, use practices of obfuscation to make a figure disappear to particular viewers. These practices, however, require extreme attention to relational, technological mechanisms of vision that ground the relational politics of figure and ground. In elaborating these binary relations, this chapter reviews and revises work on selfies to, first, stress relations beyond those of phatic communication and, second, emphasizes the material role of digital media in enabling or limiting particular relations.
