Adam Gopnik
[Writer and critic, b. 1956, Philadelphia, lives in New York.]
... a fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states—for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
Is the selfie—those newly omnipresent photos of ourselves, taken with our own little palm-fitting cameras—merely a genre of informal self-portraiture, as old as the camera and as many-sided, or is it visual crabgrass, covering over and crowding out deeper investigation of who we are?
A selfie is a mug shot we ask ourselves to sit for.
