W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #eugenevonbruenchenhein, #selfies

This is a warning about selfies.   

Not only can they bring down the powerful caught in scandalous intrigue but there are any number of stories about people, who in effect, backed up and off the cliff.  The original self lover, Narcissus was so enthralled by his beauty reflected in a pool, he drew too close, fell in and drowned.  Contemporary Narcissi like Xenia Ignatyeva, 17-year-old Russian girl, lost her balance on a bridge mid-selfie, fell on a cable and was electrocuted, and 21-year old Oscar Otero Aguilar from Mexico tried to take a selfie of himself posing with a gun and, well, you can work it out.

Thank you selfies for the ongoing popularity of Justin Bieber. Kim Kardashian’s book “Selfish” was on The New York Times best-seller list.   Four hundred and forty eight pages, and most of them have no words!  

Perhaps hazard warnings should be posted on the side of I-phones.

Making and sending pictures of your lunch, your outfits, your junk all plumped up or other body parts, the world has gone mad, it’s the moral apocalypse, and Onan is the new god.  

At least, we will have the photographic evidence.

Blame the Australians.  Google tells us that the first use of “selfie’ as a word came from down under a dozen years ago in an internet forum. Further back, in 1839, you can credit Robert Cornelius for making a daguerreotype of himself.  This was apparently one of the first images of any person, let alone a self-portrait. 

The process for Mr. Cornelius was so slow be could uncover the lens, run around to get into the picture and then go back to close it.  Nowadays he could probably post it simultaneously.  

Who did post the first selfie?  Back to Google again, it was one Jennifer Lee on Jan. 27, 2011, the day Instagram first introduced hashtags, and she is credited for adding the first one.  

In many respects the original “selfies" were the amazing “Photomatons”, 

unique photo-booth portraits in individual metal frames, especially popular between the World Wars. The photomaton was invented by Anotal Josepho (born Josephewitz in Siberia) who opened the Photomaton Studio at Broadway and 51st Street in 1925.  "With attendants at three booths, he attracted as many as 7,500 people a day leading to 280,000 customers in the first 6 months. The Broadway store was open till 4 a.m., with much of the business taking place at night. Within 20 years there were more than 30,000 booths in the United States alone, due largely to World War II soldiers exchanging photos with their loved ones.*   He died in 1980, a very wealthy man.  

This odd cultural history is a circuitous route to the self-portrait of and by Eugene von Bruenchenhein, a central figure in the American self-taught — Outsider art — pantheon. EVB was a painter, sculptor and photographer, using his wife Marie as his principal model. There are not many pictures of the man himself.

This print looks abused or, at least used, which gives it an overlay of history. That’s ok. He didn’t make art in a conventional way. This print feels like a mug shot that has made some clandestine journey, with finger prints from being handled added along the way.

It’s worthwhile spending time with materiel that exists outside of “Art” like found objects, photography that is amateur or vernacular or commercial. It stretches your eye and your heart.  

*1 from "Behind the Curtain: A History of the Photo Booth", by Mark Bloch <http://www.panmodern.com/photobooth.htm>

*2 This essay has been adapted from “This is a Warning about Selfies” ©2015

©2021

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