It is late. The night has her cold, blue body pressed up against my window. I’m bored. The day has offered nothing but lagging Zoom sessions and a Kanye West deep dive. Swimming in my static, for a few rare, spiky moments, I want to be beautiful. The thought rises. I used to get this feeling a lot as a teenager, little muffler I was. I prop my crumb embedded laptop on the toilet and use my shower curtains as a backdrop. I try on my pale bedroom for size, too, holding up a sandwich I bought earlier that day. I try to pose like those long-limbed models of the silky covers of Vogue, Dazed, Elle. Always caught between anger and euphoria, stomping and dancing in long aquamarine skirts and sharpened heels. All I can muster is a white turtleneck, my own curtain of hair, and some semblance of mood.
But — still.
There is something there, I realize as I click through the photos one by one, all varying in implying head tilts and shoulder positions. Of course, I only look beautiful in low light. Me, goblin. Picasso-faced baby, rooted darling. Mind suckled by Gabapentin. Fed tap-water and flat bread. I love her. I love her as she exists in this little box. I want to carry her around with me like a lucky charm. But why do I love this version of myself more than the more honest, outright version that lives in my iPhone? I wonder.
I’ve chewed on this idea of the webcam as a tool of self-building, and odd opulence for a while. Back during mid-pandemic, mid-summer — wading season, I called it then — I relayed my budding appreciation for webcam selfies to my friend, Sarah. How glorious the ugly can be, how grime can be mistaken for glitter in some senses. In response, Sarah sent me a couple of photo-booth selfies of her own. They held worlds of their own, too.
After a grueling six-month stay at McLean Hospital for her eating disorder, Sarah bleached her hair for the first time in half a year and took this photo. A rebirth of sorts. Eggshells, blonde as a field she could scream into. Clean. Light only comes in as it is told, stays put within the window frames. Her red shirt takes up much of the frame, a solid contrast with the otherwise white room -- the white of her eyes, headphones, wall and hair. She is taking up space as she wants to, as she has earned the right to.
Then, something more recent from the summer. Lady of quarantine in the kitchen, head full of guitar chords, questions without answers, blank spaces. Her brown swooping hair matching the brown trees on the curtains, and again she takes center stage within the frame. A centerpiece among the blinds and unnamed bottles behind her. A nonchalant, passive demand of space, this one more firm than the last.
It’s strange. How can all of these feelings, these black balloons knocking together inside of us, be both distilled and frothing over at once? How do we freeze emotions so that we still feel them when they’ve passed?
I asked for more selfies. Another friend sent me one she had taken after getting into a fight with the “lame of that era” and getting high with him. They sat on her parents porch, the air singing, spreading all around them. They felt their own perfection, how it spun on their skin. She went upstairs to change, her brain spiky, and took this.
A common trend in these photos: the centering of the self. In this one, she is directly in the center of the frame, made even more apparent by the black of her shirt, the placement of the string lights above her head. And of course her smirk. Did she feel like a diamond? Does the night still live? When she looks at this photo, perhaps she feels the summer again, hears the love-bugs humming. Maybe she even gets dizzy.
The webcam is hardly an invention of progress. It’s ugly, dim and simple. Lackluster, some would say. It serves no function outside of allowing minimal appearances, a pixelated ghost. A rough sketch of a person with the edges blurred. But in many ways, the space allows for its capabilities to be pushed farther than other devices that promise to satisfy us immediately. Empty rooms buzz loudly with potential.
My friend Mina sent me this selfie recently. Another cranky, tired quarantine selfie similar to the one Sarah sent. A collective pout in the misery garden. How dare the sun shine so brightly when there’s so much doom unfurling from every corner. A form of sadness happening everywhere you look. In this one, Mina’s white sleeves almost seem to glow, demanding our attention. They contrast and even overwhelm the green leaves behind her, stealing the spotlight. Her positioning suggests a sense of wanting to guard herself, of authority.
Mina, angel she is, also sent me this one which garnered a little shriek from me. The gaze! The central shape! It’s such a playful photo! The way she, again, takes hold of the frame. Even if there are no demanding colors this time around, the shape of her body focuses and straddles your attention. The crooked plant in the background adds another touch of oddity, too.
I got this one from Amy Espinal of Fever Dreams. I love the grain! Even with the utilized fisheye lens, the centering of herself is overt. Hearts flood the screen, from the shiny pink hearts on her wall to the moody black heart drooping behind her, to the artificial heart filter. The inference of the self is at times more forgiving towards faults that a more direct image of the self might focus on and exacerbate. This inference allows for comfort and playfulness to sneak through.
I got these couplet of selfies from Cel of Fever Dreams and was immediately struck by the exuberance displayed in them. Influenced by the film Black Swan, a film that questions the self and the multiplicities of the self, Cel did her makeup. A look of both clown and stage. Her complete overwhelming of the frame, which is aided by the already dark room, suggests confidence, a desire to be express to cinema within herself. A cinema that plays only the most surreal and cerebral of films. A merry go round of dreams.
In collecting these photos I began to question our inherent motives behind taking selfies, and what appeals to me so much about the webcam. Perhaps we feel more control — an aspect of our lives that is slowly being bled from us through the invasion of an insidious social media based culture — when we are back to basics we cannot argue with. Where it is you and the light. You and the dust. You and this little screen. Perhaps we like to fantasize more often than not. We like to keep parts of ourselves hidden. We want bodies caught between silhouettes and portraits. We don’t want all the details, only the broad strokes. We are tired of all the world asking us to exist so obviously.
Perhaps we just want to feel beautiful again. To remind ourselves that even in the dampest of lighting, there is still a way to feel like a ballgown. A ballroom, even.
Of course, the selfie isn’t new or a trademark of the modern era. We have been making art out of ourselves for as long as we’ve been able to. Whether to document our existence or to elevate our existence, the results remain relevant. And the webcam is a tool for art in the same way a canvas is. Or a scalpel. How we shape ourselves according to the small, needy frame of our grainy webcam is not dissimilar to other self-portraits by the likes of Egon Shiele, Matisse, even Van Gogh.
