A middle-aged woman roamed the streets with a bag of colorful wax crayons. She stopped at public walls and gates, filling them with what seemed like incoherent sentences, insignificant dates, and fragments of a geography lesson. When the walls were painted to cover her marks, she returned. Scribbling, re-writing, and overwriting on them again and again.

This the story of Deepa Saxena, a former teacher who, for the past ten years, has been inscribing her words on the walls of Meerut; a small town in Northern India. When asked why she continued to do so, Saxena, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, told the Times Of India in 2014, “I write on the walls for I’ve no one to talk to, nobody wants to listen to my story. I need some way to express my thoughts, which is why I pen them down on the walls.”

A year later, Palak Mittal, a Delhi-based photographer, would decide to listen and tell this narrative of mental anguish through her haunting photo series —The Woman Who Conquered Town. Mital was visiting Meerut, her hometown, for the summer holidays when she first noticed  

Saxena’s writings on almost every street wall in the town’s cantonment area; at times as far as a 5km radius. She found it odd that nobody talked about these writings, and when she asked around the answer was curt if not unconvincing; it’s by the crazy lady in town.  

While the common consensus seemed that Saxena’s mental illness was a result of being abandoned by her husband, Mittal later found that she was never married. As Mittal sifted through urban legends and facts, some part of the truth began to reveal itself. “Her parents were very selfish and dependent on her. She never really invested in her own personal life. When everyone she knew went away or died she became lonely,” says 23-year-old Mittal, who was in touch with Saxena’s family friend. “Though I have never really spoken to her personally because  I don’t think it’s fair for me to bring back her trauma.” She prefers to refer to Saxena as ‘the lady.’

Mittal’s photo series is a heartbreaking revelation of apathy not only towards Saxena but to most people who seek mental health care in India. An estimated 150 million people across India — that is larger than the entire population of Japan— are in need of mental health care interventions, both short and long-term, according to India’s latest National Mental Health Survey 2015-16. The survey also found that, depending on the state, between 70% and 92% of those in need of mental health care failed to receive any treatment. Which further accounts for the reason why in India one student commits suicide every hour.

However, Mittal has stayed away from statistics in her work. “Mental health has always been something that has been going on in somebody’s head and you really cannot see it,” she says. “That is why I think photography is the best medium for this story. Here the suffering is tangible.”

I caught up with Mittal to chat about her experience of capturing these wounded walls of Meerut, the stories she uncovered through them and India’s relationship with mental health conversations.   

Payal Mohta: Did you find that that Saxena’s writings were able to tell her story?

Palak Mittal: The writings on the walls might seem hazy but if you study them closely they are very precise. They state clear bank details, dates and people’s names, in both English and Hindi. The lady is calling those people out who refused to help her and even financially cheated or deserted her. Another theme that recurs is of marriage and divorce. There is this one phrase that she wrote that keeps coming back to me —’Why Indian Girl Must Marry.’ It’s so relatable because women across different sections of Indian society find that marriage becomes more of a regulation that comes with age rather than choice.

What was the most challenging part of shooting the story?

The biggest challenge of this project was to be able to capture and allow the viewers to know the magnitude of it. The lady has written all over town, sometimes as much as through a 500 meter stretch of walls. To show this scale with my camera took a bit of strategizing. I finally decided to do a few panoramic photographs where a wider area can be captured in a single frame.

Did you find yourself drawn to any one particular wall?

Yes, I did. There are these set of walls belonging to a convent school around my home which has verses from the Bible inscribed on it. These phrases are written in English and then translated into Hindi. It is on these walls that the lady has written and rewritten. As a photographer, this was visually very interesting for me because it reflected an ironic juxtaposition; messages from God on selflessness and kindness existing with the lady’s unanswered calls for help.

What did you find most tragic about the story?

The people of Meerut knew that there is this lady who roams the street and writes on walls for years. They treated it like a monotonous activity. Nobody cared or bothered to know more about what troubled her or rather did not want to take any responsibility for it. That is for me the most tragic part of the story.  

Every time I broached the topic of why nobody had tried to help her in the past in Meerut, people had a standard excuse—she didn’t want help herself or nothing seemed to work for her. My town’s mentality became evident; everyone was just so consumed in their lives they didn’t want to genuinely reach out to her. This, of course, represents in many ways the larger perspective of Indian society on mental health — it’s not looked upon like a disease that can be treated with counseling and medicine. The dominant belief remains that people just go mad.

How did the people of Meerut react to your photo series?

Thankfully, I never received any backlash. It was more positive feedback than I ever expected. I became sort of popular in town which made me really happy because that meant that finally people were addressing and talking about mental health, one way or another. So many people from Meerut, including friends, family, acquaintances and complete strangers reached out to me and appreciated my work. Though what was common in all these interactions was a sense of guilt in the locals, of having ignored a story of suffering in their own backyard.

I think why people reacted to my story in this way was also because of its digital reach. Suddenly it was in their newsfeeds and insta stories and as we are on our phones most of the day, people just could not ignore it anymore. For better or for worse at least in this way mental health was addressed and talked about. That was all that was needed.  

Do you continue to photograph Saxena’s writings?

The lady doesn’t write anymore. It’s been a few years since she has recovered and now is completely stable. But if you turn around a corner in Meerut, at times you will still find her writing. It tends to live on.

Bianca Xunise is a Black goth and describes herself as “unapologetically hood.” An artist from the Southside of Chicago, her work is incredibly diverse, exploring anti-blackness, the reappropriation of problematic personas like Josephine Baker, beauty, gender, and of course, her love of goth icons. She was awarded the coveted 2017 Ignatz award for Promising New Talent for her comic Say Her Name, which took aim at the silence surrounding Black women killed by police violence.

My first exposure to Xunise’s work was at Pitchfork Music Festival 2017 in Union Park. I was looking through the book vendor area, when a print of Poly Styrene—the Somali-English frontwoman for the ‘70s jazz punk band X-ray Spex—caught my eye.

X-ray Spex was a band from that era that actually had a member of color, and seeing her iconic lyric, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think, oh bondage up yours!” memorialized in Bianca’s art warmed my heart.

I bought the print right then and there and continued to follow her work.

From her meticulously chosen outfits—made up of leather harnesses, berets, and ’70s-inspired high-waisted pants—to her unrelenting love of The Craft, and her penchant for singing along to songs by the Damned or David Bowie, Xunise is part and parcel of a very Chicago Goth experience.

As a Chicago transplant, Bianca Xunise seems to be an all knowing insider of the city. I was lucky enough to meet up with her recently to talk about nightlife in Chicago, her unique experience as a Black goth and comic, and the political importance of going out and dancing.

How do you identify your taste in music? I ask because I tend to use the words “new wave,” “post-punk” and “goth” interchangeably.

I use those terms interchangeably too and I feel like a lot of times people misunderstand what I mean by goth. When I say goth, they’re probably like, ‘oh she likes Evanescence and new goth from like the mid 2000s or early 2000s.’ But when I say goth I mean something older—bands like Batcave and Darkwave, The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux and stuff like that.

Sometimes I use the Pitchfork video to inform people. It’s been really helpful…

That video was really helpful! Again, cause I feel like people misunderstand what it means and in our modern society with the internet and everything else, all cultures have begun to be kind of melted into one. A good example of this would be like Lil Uzi [Vert]. He like does trap rap, but he’s also sort of goth and sort of emo at the same time—it all blends together. And say if you’re like 15, 16, 17 and if you think Lil Uzi’s goth, then what you understand as goth is not going to be where it actually came from. You’re gonna have a whole new understanding of what you think goth is.

Often, as far as they want to go is Evanescence or Avril Lavigne, but you gotta keep going further and further back. I just started listening to some older goth music like Virgin Prunes—that’s from the ‘70s—so I am exploring how goth intersects with my Blackness and listening to bands like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Why did you start drawing about these experiences with the goth subculture? I saw one of your comics—Saturday at the Goth Club—where it’s just a little ‘slice of life’ comic where you’re just at the club and you have poison written on your shirt?

One of the reasons is I was just trying to find something to write about. A lot of my work is political. But when I first started out as a comics artist, much of my work was kind of simple—about everyday life—and I missed writing about those things. My work was getting so heavy.

I wanted to bring some more lightness to it. I thought it’d be fun to show people a window into this world—there’s a lot of misconceptions about it, ‘like what do you guys do all day, hang out under the highway underpasses and dance?!’ I think people don’t understand a lot of it is just a bunch of nerds hanging out ’cause we like the same music—we’re all pretty dorky.

What are your favorite goth clubs/nights in Chicago?

I go to Late Bar, which is a big one for me. I used to go to the old Neo when that was still open. RIP. Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I feel interested in what has been happening now, ‘cause I feel like everyone is splitting up and making new safe spaces—like a lot of things happening at Berlin now. And that would be more Wax Trax! [the industrial music label based in Chicago]. Exit is another place that does ‘80s music either on Thursdays or every other Saturday.  

And then there’s the new Neo. That was really rough at first. People were very against it. Actually, one of the things I really like about “Deboneo” as they call it, is how queer it’s become. There’s been a lot more black and brown queer faces showing up there. So for me seeing the goth culture blend with the club kid culture and become this one safe space of, like, weirdos and queers and drag queens and awesomeness—that’s super important to me. That’s when it gets to the best place—when it’s come as you are. No matter how weird. This is a place for you. Let’s all dance to this old shitty song.

What about them makes them feel safe?

Not all the clubs have done this, but I know Late Bar made a statement that they’re a safe space—I think this happened maybe during the election last year. Or maybe even the year before when we heard that Trump was gonna be running. They released a press release and they said, ‘we want to be known as a safe space. This is not a space for discrimination.’ They definitely upped their security after that. There’s always people on the floor.  

But I’ve seen it misunderstood as though they were being predatory—like, ‘there’s this man and why is he coming up and taking my drink away from me. Get away from me.’ But a lot of times when they do that, it’s cause they saw something put into your drink or something like that and they’re trying to make sure that you get home safe—they filter people out all day. And make sure that it stays a place that people can feel comfortable going to.

The best place is when it’s 'come as you are. No matter how weird. This is a place for you. Let’s all dance to this old shitty song.'
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The people there are of every race and gender and you know it’s grown to be a really great thing. I’m not really sure where the crossroads is of different cultures come together, but I think it’s just about the music. A lot of it is being borrowed from each other. Like punk has always been influenced by like the ballroom scene and the ballroom scene in turn is influenced by punk, but it’s all counterculture.

The goth community is a blend of everything.

Also it’s no longer just old white dudes anymore. Brown kids want to be a part of it and you should be allowed to identify with multiple things—you may be into goth music and goth culture but you also may be really into feminism and witchcraft. You might be really into drag and you’re also really into punk rock—you can pick and choose whatever you want. You shouldn’t have to choose what you love. Take it all in and make a new culture out of it.

It’s like, everyone else is kind of shitty, so like why be shitty here?

So your impression of goths and the goth community is pretty positive?

Yeah, I think that’s one of the reasons why I find goths to be pretty nice—they’re so used to everybody else treating them poorly. That’s how I felt about the older goths who set up the bar. They’ve always been kind of kind to me, which I’ve always kind of been a little nervous coming into the scene as a black woman who is used to—especially in like my comics world—white guys pushing back when they see me come and take up space. But in the goth community I see, ‘You’re weird. I’m weird!’ That’s all that matters.

I actually drew a comic about how the goth community is one of the few that I feel I’ve been able to be a part of and the first thing people don’t register about me is that I’m black. In every other space that I take up people think as soon as they see me—Black woman. And then with that they have all these other ideas about me in their head about black women and who they are.

But when I enter a space like Late Bar or Exit or Neo—I don’t feel like people see that right away, they just see somebody that’s just like them and they accept me.

That’s beautiful. Have you had any negative and racist experiences in the scene?

Oh yeah. I have racist experiences everywhere.

I think you mentioned an incident at a Nine Inch Nails show…

I was at a Nine Inch Nails show—actually this was before Nine Inch Nails—it was New Order. I was at New Order and this woman grabbed my hair because I was dancing—as you would—to New Order and apparently my hair touched her face and as I was bouncing or whatever and it brushed her face. So she dug her hand into my scalp and tried to rip my hair out. She grabbed my hair and said, ‘I grabbed your hair because I didn’t like it!’ That was her reasoning.

It was really upsetting and frustrating, but I don’t really attribute that to the community as much as being at a concert. I’ve always had pretty bad experiences at festivals and concerts in general. I’ve gotten into a few fist fights at concerts. It kind of goes hand-in-hand for me there.

In my comics world, white guys pushing back when they see me come and take up space. But in the goth community I see, ‘You’re weird. I’m weird!’ That’s all that matters.
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You try to reason with it and then you realize that racism is the only reason that’s going to work here. I wasn’t the only person there. It wasn’t just me being rambunctious in a group of people sitting quietly on the ground. It was me and bunch of other white dudes that were all dancing. But I’m the one that she decided to attack. I confronted her about that and when I called her out, the dudes that I was dancing with were like no need to call her that. [A racist]. That was really frustrating. And then what was weird was that the two dudes she was with ended up apologizing to my boyfriend and I was like, why isn’t anyone apologizing to me.

But it hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s made me feel unsafe—I also know the punk and goth community have done a lot to combat racism and fascism. I don’t feel like the first person I’m going to meet [in those spaces] is going to be a racist.

You try to reason with something that happened and then you realize that racism is the only reason that’s going to work here.
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I was working on a piece on if you want to check it out, about Rock Against Racism. A lot of the bands that I like—the Clash, X-Ray Spex and stuff—they did what they could do in the ‘70s to try to combat racism.

Going back to going out and goth nights as safe spaces. I’m going to reference your tweets. “I’ve been trying to figure out the point in society where we deemed going out and dancing a sinful thing to do.” I was hoping you could elaborate on this perspective. Why do you think it’s looked down upon and why is it so special and important that you are able to go out and dance? People obviously shit on it, right? Like, ‘you’re just going out and you’re drinking!,’ but to you it’s important. What is it that makes it important, in terms of your identity and your interests?

I definitely got a lot of feedback on that tweet and people brought some stuff up to me that I hadn’t considered before—especially us being a country founded on puritan beliefs and how that’s still affects American society—even in terms of our movies where it’s OK to show violence, but it’s bad to show sex.

We like to market things as sinful and I think that’s where it’s confusing to me—how is it sinful to have community and feel uplifted by this community and feel safe? Where is the sin in that? The drinking part is not super important—you can add or remove alcohol. Yes that exists there, but I also have friends who are sober and still go out to the goth club because it’s not about the drinking. It’s about being around your friends. It’s a chosen family. It’s a family you only want to be around so long and then you want to go back home.

I know I’ve mentioned this a few times but there’s so much happening in the world. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone dancing more this year probably than any other year because I just need that place, a place to not have to hear about Donald Trump, and not have to uplift all the hate that’s going on.

Every time I go to Late Bar they always play this song, “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing.” It’s a place be around people who are gonna give you love. Every time I’m there people ask me, ‘how are your comics? What’s going on in your life? How’s this art show going?’ We know each other enough to know what’s going on in our families and stuff like that. It’s never like a place of hate.

How is it 'sinful' to have community and feel uplifted by this community and feel safe?
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I’ve gone to normie clubs that everybody else goes to and I can see why people hate them. I feel like it’s a different experience. When you add “club” to something then people have this idea that’s it’s going to be this bump and grind, overly sexual, predatory space. In fact, I was at the Owl last Saturday and I was there for half an hour and I think I got groped like 8-10 times just from walking back and forth. Someone put their hands on my butt; they put their hands on my shoulder and tried to put their hands in the curve of my side. And I was like, I don’t want to be here.

Most dudes that I’ve dealt with at the goth club ask permission to dance with you or they have the nice Catholic school space between each other—where it’s just enough room for the holy spirit.

It’s good exercise too. I think everybody needs a space to be able to turn their brain off and just exhale. It saddens me that I try to explain this to my parents and they think I’m out living this life of sin when I’m really just sitting around with a bunch of nerdy people and we’re talking about Stranger Things.

What songs are a must for a perfect new wave night?

Love Will Tear Us Apart — Joy Division

Ant Music — Adam Ant

Girls on Film — Duran Duran

Spellbound — Siouxsie and the Banshees

I Know What Boys Like — The Waitresses

Let’s Go To Bed — The Cure

The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, the recently upheld Muslim Ban, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.

I f you ask an Iranian, “How were the Festival of Fires of your childhood?” they may answer you, “I loved it. I loved to play with the fire, to jump over it, to measure myself against the other children — who could jump higher and longer. I loved to stay awake all night long.”

Many years ago, when I was just a little boy, all we had was fire — firecrackers were a rarity. But one day my friend gave me just one firecracker, and I ran through the streets of our neighborhood — proud and full of anticipation — searching for a suitable place to set it off. As was custom, people were sleeping in the afternoon to become fresh for the rest of the working day.

A side street close to my home seemed to be the right place. I ignited the firecracker and threw it against a house wall. The bang was enormous; I imagine Tehran had only heard such a bang in times of war.

I was shocked and delighted, but when I looked around, I noticed that everywhere people were standing still and looking at me. I grew frightened, believing people might hit me in anger over disturbing their siesta. As fast as I could, I ran back home.

But the bang was so beautiful, I could never forget it.

Today Tehran is a blur of bangs. It doesn’t allow for any siestas; its streets wake the sleepers from their dreams. Thanks to the influx of Chinese imports, firecrackers are available in every imaginable variety.

Parents look on with growing worry, and there are serious burns every year, despite warnings on television. But on the Night of Fire, no child can be kept at home, and no adults can resist the spectacle.

On the Night of Fire, Tehran is a living, breathing explosion — colors paint the sky, and everything that otherwise has no release valve goes off; young people in the streets dance to Persian rhythms, the whole neighborhood gathers together, and everybody with legs jumps over the fires. The fires are everywhere.

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On the Night of Fire in Tehran, everything that otherwise has no release valve goes off.
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Jumping over fires has a long tradition in Iran, going back at least 3,000 years. The fire has a purifying effect. With the jump, all sicknesses and problems are offered to the fire. People sing, zardi-ye man az toh, sorkhi-ye toh az ma, which means, the yellowish is yours and the reddish is mine. The yellow color symbolizes all the bad things which people might have collected in the old year, while the red stands for the warmth and life force the fire can give.

The Festival of Fire — also called Chahārshanbeh Suri — is celebrated the last Wednesday before Iranian New Year, which heralds our season of spring; it is not without controversy.

After the fireworks have finished and the fires are extinguished, families sit together and shake the chill off from the streets; rice pudding with hot cherries is served in Persian homes.

From time to time you’ll hear the banging of pots and pans — slowly the city and its mountains are covered by a veil of smoke. Houselights burn through the dust, then slowly they click off one by one, until only the streetlights are burning, and the roads are finally empty.

With the darkness, dreams rise toward heaven. They are dreams of lightning, of fire, of fireworks.

By Sarah Galo

The Internet, we’re often told, is eroding society. We can’t communicate as well; we’ve become increasingly visual with short attention spans; we’re killing print and content quality with digital media. But while it’s true that we have more information presented to us on a daily basis than our grandparents likely had in a month, it’s absurd to claim that we’re taking steps back as a society because of the Internet itself. It comes across as a collective tsk-tsking by older generations, whose very own innovations led us to this point in time.

When I think of the possibilities the Internet presents, I think of journalist Rachel Syme, who has taken over my Twitter timeline numerous times in the last year with streams of retweeted selfies and plenty of her own. Syme is behind “SELFIE,” an interactive, seven-part series on the much-maligned social media fixture that seeks to defy existing stigmas.

It’s a celebration of those who take selfies and the meanings behind the act, a historical record of female photographers who have only existed as footnotes in the histories of men, and a gathering together of our current cultural landscape. At a time when we are encouraged to embrace the “being chill,” Syme’s essay reminds us not only of the joy of focusing on the minutiae and excitement of a singular topic; her words explain the satisfied feeling of having captured one’s true self in a selfie.

Like Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” which can be seen as the embodiment of all the tension and disorder of the late 1960s, Syme’s “SELFIE” is destined to be the go-to essay for understanding our modern milieu.

Sarah Galo: Walk me through your process for “SELFIE.” How did you come up with it?

Rachel Syme: I started thinking about writing something about selfies when the Kim Kardashian coffee table book was coming out. I had written a fair amount about the power of Kim Kardashian as an image maker and way to understand modern celebrity, and I felt like there was something powerful to say about her iconography in conjunction with the publication of Selfish.

As I started to work on that piece, I realized that the number of selfies were growing exponentially on every platform, and the practice was much bigger than just any one celebrity or trend piece; it was a movement, a phenomenon, a new language. I started probing my own reasons for taking selfies, and as I did that, I realized that they were as varied as the reasons for speaking, or writing, or expressing myself — that there were so many different places that my own selfie-taking/posting were coming from — and I started to wonder if that might be the case for others.

So I started reporting, asking people to send me their selfies and the stories behind them, and what started to come in were all these extremely moving, enlightening, heartfelt, funny, and wildly divergent stories. That’s when I knew this was a bigger piece than just a book review.

Sarah: Did you know it was going to be a super big project when you began?

Rachel: The idea to write a kind of mini-book in seven chapters came as an organizing principle for all these wild thoughts I was having — a way to rein them into some kind of recognizable structure. Because, you will find, when you start thinking about selfies and self-representation, there is no endpoint. It’s theory, it’s art history, it’s sociology, it’s criticism, it’s pop culture, it’s linguistics.

You can really do deep dives on nearly every subject, beginning with the selfie. People ask me how I got 10k words out of the subject, but the truth is, I made myself stop writing at a kind of arbitrary point so we could publish. I could have gone on researching/writing for months and months — I didn’t include half of the things I wanted to! It’s such a rich subject, and I have a feeling we are just at the beginning of the field of selfie studies.

Sarah: Selfies can appear to be a “selfish” activity, as you note early in “SELFIE.” You write: “Maybe they are lonesome and hungry for connection, projecting their own lack of community onto this woman’s solo show, believing her to be isolated rather than expansive.”

I know I definitely felt that way when I first took selfies back in high school . . . What unique space do selfies occupy in Internet culture and the wider visual culture? Do you think taking offense at selfies (and to an extent, ambition, as you note) is uniquely coded toward women/gender-nonconforming individuals?

Rachel: The gender breakdown of selfie-taking currently skews far more female (or gender non-conforming), and so a lot of the language against selfies has taken on a lot of the tone that is often leveled at “feminine-coded” behaviors: too vain, too superficial, too much, too occupying of our visual space. I started to really think about the ways selfies are derided (beyond the calls of narcissism, which will always follow them around) when a pair of announcers at an Arizona Diamondbacks game started making fun of a group of sorority sisters who they caught all taking selfies on the jumbotron camera.

What was bizarre is, moments before, the announcers had asked people in the stands to send in fan photos, but then when they zoomed in on this group of women, the tone suddenly turned disdainful — and it became clear to me that there was something very wrong in the way some people are talking about selfies.

Certain people seeing themselves with affection, outside of the systems in which those people are usually seen, can start to feel threatening (or at least troubling) to those in positions of power, and in this instance — and in many instances — that threat is expressed as jokes by men about women and their selfies.

I found that there are many reasons women (and those who are non-binary) take selfies, and very few of them are for the admiration or attention of men — it is much more about communicating with the wider world about how you want to be seen, which is an ambitious act in itself. And there is nothing that throws people off more than a person with the ambition to take up space when they have not come up through traditional cultural channels.

Sarah: Do you think selfies are a way of escaping the male gaze? Are we still enacting it in a way John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing: “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight”?

Rachel: I think selfies are all about the gaze, but not necessarily just the male one — they are asking everyone to gaze upon us, and in turn, they are about gazing at others with curiosity, desire, ardor, and interest. I still speak to a lot of people who bring up “objectification” as if it is the original sin, that if a woman turns herself into a vision, a surveyed female, then she is somehow abandoning herself, that she is somehow deciding that her looks are her only currency, that her face is her only asset, etc.

But I have found that selfies are introducing a totally new way of seeing that doesn’t necessarily turn people into objects, but rather avatars — whether that is dangerous or not, we are still finding out. But these avatars get to have adventures, to go off and speak for you, to collect and fact-find information. And part of taking selfies is interacting with others’ avatars, seeing what they have to say.

So on the one hand, we are using our images as currency, but I am not sure we are necessarily doing so for the benefit of any one particular gaze, if that makes sense. I think the male gaze can actually be undercut by selfies, because there are many communities of selfies built around inclusiveness and protection from the kind of gawking, lascivious eye of that gaze. Selfies are actually making a lot of people confront how they are seen in the world by that gaze, and then working online to try to create a better way of seeing.

Sarah: I love that you devoted a section to the women who have come before us and experimented with self-portrait. You wrote: “So many women’s stories were erased (and will never be recovered) because they didn’t have access to private image-making.”

How do you go about finding the hidden histories in our everyday actions?

Rachel: I am a historian at heart — I am writing a book about events that happened almost 100 years ago now to explain our current day — and so I am always looking at modern actions through a transhistorical lens. I think you have to — there is so much humanity in recognizing our history, and we lose so much by not linking back to the past.

So for me, seeing selfies in terms of women and historical self-portraiture was natural. I am always collecting these little stories of women of the past when I read and storing them in my kangaroo pouch for later — the three I wrote about were women I have been interested in for some time; I think I read my first biography of Clover Adams about six years ago now.

I found that there are many reasons women (and those who are non-binary) take selfies, are about communicating with the wider world about how you want to be seen.
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For me, diving into history is the most exciting way to write about the future, because it is all connected. You cannot understand the value of selfies in our culture if you don’t understand what it might have been like to dream of having the power and freedom that selfies give us . . . but not being able to due to technological, social, or even misogynistic restrictions.

And for me, the image that really stuck in my head throughout this whole project was of my ancestors, and how I wish I had their selfies. I still wish that all the time — what would my great-grandmother Rose have wanted me to know about how she wanted to be seen, how she felt when she was alone, what stories her face in those moments might have told me? Selfies are diaristic, and even that simple aspect alone should redeem them — don’t you want your future grandchildren to know how you saw yourself, but also to know how others interacted with your image? You are creating, like I wrote in the piece, an artifact and a gift. Even if you don’t know it yet.

Diving into history is the most exciting way to write about the future, because it is all connected.
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Sarah: I couldn’t help but be reminded of Joan Didion’s “The White Album” as I read, partly because your essay is about a kind of storytelling, and because you reference so many cultural placeholders and news events as a way of anchoring the piece in 2015. Were there specific authors you looked to for inspiration when writing “Selfie”?

Rachel: Thank you so much! I mean, god bless Saint Joan. She’s always on my shoulder somewhere. I read a lot of Sontag in relation to photography, and then a lot of historical narrative about women and seeing — I really got a lot out of reading Marsha Meskimmon’s The Art of Reflection, about the history of women and self-portraiture, and out of reading some feminist critiques of visual culture and capitalism, such as Sheila Rowbotham and Virginie Despentes. But I also kept John Berger around for reference a lot and read a lot of my favorite modern writers to try to marinate in their words — Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit.

I was reading Jessa Crispin’s new book of essays, called Dead Ladies Project this fall as well, and found that much of her generous and elegant historical writing made me feel certain that I wanted to include the women of the past in the final piece.

I like a great deal of writing that is out now, but I also felt scared that what I was doing felt a little different than a lot of the things I read — at times it felt a little too political (or as the kids would say it, a bit too full of fire content), a little too sentimental with regard to the themes of empowerment, a little too long, a little too romantic about what I think asserting one’s humanity can achieve.

But when you feel those things — that a piece of writing might be swerving into something that scares you, that’s when I find you have to keep going, have to keep pushing into the scarier place. Because I had never written anything like this before, either. So I sort of stumbled through the dark to get to the end, and when I emerged, I felt like less of an impostor than I did going in. And that is sometimes all you can hope for!

Sarah: On a more technical level, do you think “Selfie” is representative of the potential of digital journalism? It’s a marvel of inclusion, allowing others to contribute to your overall thesis, and I think that’s what makes it so powerful.

Rachel: I owe a lot to my editor at Matter, Mark Lotto, who is one of the only editors I have worked with who runs an online publication and feels excited about all of the things that means, rather than what it excludes. I find a lot of editors working online run their sites like print magazines — and often very good print magazines — in that they attach words to images with a headline and then press publish, and that’s the article.

I have never seen the web that way — why would we just want to reproduce the experience of print online — and so I am so happy to be working with someone like Mark who doesn’t either. For me, the web is a marvel — I love Twitter, I love Tumblr, I love the lightning pace of discovery on it. If you are someone with a curious mind, or at least one that likes to see links between things, then the web is a candy store. You can have ten tabs open and they all somehow relate to each other, and that’s where the big themes begin to emerge.

Web journalism that feels isolationist — that doesn’t reach out and connect to the larger world — doesn’t take advantage of the best part of the Internet, which is that it is a hyper-connected place. For the selfies piece, I couldn’t have written it in a vacuum. It is about a social act, and so the reporting had to be social. I had to ask people for their selfies, for their stories, to be included in the piece.

It wouldn’t have made sense without all the other faces — I wish it had felt even more like there was an Instagram feed dropped into the middle of the piece. And the response has been so amazing — I’ve gotten a ton of selfies via email, Insta, DM, etc, and I think that is because the piece is meant to reach out — just as selfies do — and have adventures beyond itself.

The potential of digital journalism is as radical as the potential of selfies; and it is all a process of experimentation. I was so lucky to get to try something new with this, and it has sent my mind spinning into so many new directions about where digital writing can go (and where I want to take it ) next.

All images courtesy of Rachel Syme

A five-shots-of-anything-for-$10 deal, a young Tom Selleck lookalike, a swollen ankle, a cop car, a lost cab, and bumfuck Brooklyn . . . “Guys We Fucked” co-host Krystyna Hutchinson opens up about a New Year’s Eve to remember (and regret).

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