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.

A woman sitting on a toilet in a wedding gown next to a litter box. A woman, naked, lying on a settee. A pregnant woman dressed in a bathing suit. A woman pumping breast milk. A woman lying next to a small child and a cut-out skeleton. And 61 more photographs featuring the same woman in a range of states of undress, most featuring the subject’s face either cut from the frame or obscured.

This is what makes up Michael E. Northrup’s Dream Away, published last month to acclaim from the New Yorker and the Guardian, among others. The experience of looking at the work is a little unnerving: Vogue Italia acknowledged the discomfiting nature of the images, saying “you’re not sure you’re allowed to but nonetheless you can’t look away.” That seems to be the point.

The woman in Dream Away is Northrup’s ex-wife, and the pictures were taken over the course of their relationship — they met in 1976, married in 1978, and divorced by 1988. The domestic intimacy of the images is all part of the 1960s snapshot aesthetic that Northrup himself has expressed affinity for. A commercial artist as well as art photographer, much of his work over the past decades has played with this style of image-making, while also experimenting with light and flash. He’s certainly quite successful at making the viewer feel like they are getting a long glimpse at private moments.

But it is nearly impossible to look at the works that make up Dream Away and not think about the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.

Thing is, in the discussion of these “arrestingly intimate” images, there appears a comment from the artist that might give one pause. “She hasn’t seen it yet,” he says in an interview with Sleek, “if she likes it that would make me immensely happy, and if she doesn’t, that’s her problem.”

Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.
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Though there’s no mention in any of the articles about what the woman in the photos might think about being in said photos, a quick Google search reveals that his ex-wife did, and perhaps still does, have a problem. Back in 2013, in a short email exchange published on a photography blog, Northrup writes about how his wife had asked for these images not to be published. Northrup asked for permission and received a no in response. On Twitter, Alexandra Schwartz, who wrote the piece about Dream Away for the New Yorker, revealed that Northrup received a refusal for an initial edit and that this is a new set of photographs. But that doesn’t indicate permission.

Before continuing, it should be said that this is not an attempt to suggest that the book should not have been published and that its existence is somehow illegal. It’s more a question of what it means to ask someone a question, not receive the answer you want, and then move ahead. What are the ethics of producing this type of work? And what does it say about the relationship between a male photographer and a female subject?

Directors Shouldn’t Abuse Actors For The Sake Of ‘Brilliant’ Art
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Northrup’s personal, written admission of his ex-wife’s refusal was then accompanied by a hearty helping of reasons why, as an artist, he has a right to publish his images: “I have a copyright lawyer here who says my first amendment rights trumps her rights to privacy as long as I meet some requirements.” He then expresses the opinion that he is “the creator” and “in the art world, once you pose with the understanding of the intentions of the photographer, then you’re giving rights.”

Reflecting a problematic view that if a woman says yes to one man in one circumstance, that should do for all men and if circumstances change, Northrup continues that since his ex-wife posed naked for another photographer and that photo has circulated without complaint, he should have no problem. Reading argument after argument — at one point Northrup says that his ex is “immoral” for denying his request for permission — it is hard not to feel that this is the attitude of a man who feels that he has a right to more than just a photograph. In the ensuing discussion (all amongst men, it should be noted), it is suggested consistently that the photographer’s rights trump that of the subject.

Max Houghton is a professor of photography at the London College of Communication, and she runs their master’s program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. She has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues around photography and the representation of women both in images and in the field in general, recently publishing  Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now alongside Fiona Rogers. When asked about Dream Away and the issue of consent, “for me,” she says, “it is about this absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.”

“I really hated the way that he brought up the fact that she posed for other people naked,” she says. “I detested the fact that he used that as if to say she’ll show herself anywhere. It just is not relevant. The guy literally thinks that he has the divine right because they were once married to do whatever he wanted.”

The female voice is pushed aside or silenced and the male project becomes all-encompassing. For Northrup, this isn’t work that has come out of a relationship between two people. This isn’t a creative partnership, perhaps like that of Emmet and Edith Gowin, which Houghton provides as a comparative example of photographer husband and photographed wife. “Close human relationships can be the most beautiful places to explore intimacy and what that is. It can be consensual,” Houghton explains. “But these things can change over time. Even if it is the male with the camera, with the power, with the framing, with everything, it’s not necessarily problematic from the word go.”

This is about an absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.
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Instead, Northrup’s ex-wife simply becomes a vehicle for Northrup’s creative practice. “I’m also not sure why the concern is so heavy to the side of the subject instead of the photographer,” he complains, in the comment section of photographer Jin Zhu’s no longer active blog that took him to task for his perspective. “If I publish, she looses [sic] nothing. I would not publish images that I thought might damage her situation. And if you llook [sic] at the images I think you’d have trouble finding anything demeaning in them. If I don’t publish I loose [sic] 10 years of part of my life and the ability to share my work. I loose [sic] my freedom of speech.”

But we still do not have his ex-wife’s opinion in all of this, the simple fact of whether or not she’s okay with her often nude body being displayed in public. Considering this, it’s not hard to understand why so many images cut chunks of his ex-wife out of the picture. When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.” This attitude requires that he see her as nothing but an object, and he does, stating that the photographs don’t even display his ex-wife at all. They “have [her] likeness but that is only through the illusion of the photo.”

When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.”

No matter how much Northrup would like to pretend otherwise, the photographs in Dream Away did require two people to be made. Northrup can choose which photos to include and audiences can argue whether or not the photos are defamatory (which has occurred online), but this leaves out the other person — the one who was photographed repeatedly for a decade starting over 40 years ago. Northrup does not, in any discussion that he has had online, seem to recognize his own privileged position as artist, as photographer. Reflecting what has become a familiar men’s rights refrain, he sees the woman as being all powerful simply for denying him that which he feels entitled to.

Northrup complains that his ex-wife doesn’t have a good reason for questioning his publication of these photographs, but what is his reason for insisting? And why is it any more valid?

Beyond this, however, is perhaps an even wider question: What societal forces have allowed Northup to feel entitled and justified in his defense of his work? He clearly does not recognize the power and privilege that he holds as the man behind the camera. As Houghton puts it, “anyone can make a nice image these days, really. And so we do need to be asking more of people who choose to call themselves a photographer, an artist, a creator. If you are going to use those terms, they are loaded terms, they are privileged terms, and so what are you doing to earn that privilege?”

Tonika Johnson is using her art to ‘interrupt stereotypes.’

Tonika Johnson is a 37-year-old native Chicagoan making a name for herself as a street photographer. Her community, Englewood, rose to infamy after Spike Lee’s 2015 film Chi-Raq portrayed it as a hotbed of gun violence. “This is not the Englewood I experienced growing up, or that I currently see through my lens,” she says on her artist’s statement.

For Johnson, the still image and social justice go hand-in-hand: She wants to highlight the joy, power, and humanity of marginalized communities that are often overlooked or outright demonized by popular media. Through her tender images of everyday life, Johnson is systematically shattering preconceived notions about Englewood, and in their wake she offers outsiders — as well as the community itself — “a more accurate and artistically beautiful reflection of themselves” than is ever depicted.

The Establishment sat down with Johnson to talk cameras, race, and the role of art in resisting Trump.

What is your earliest memory of photography?

It was freshman year of high school, and I was in a Saturday writing program called Young Chicago Authors. The program held a special photography class, and I took it. After that I started to write less and less poetry and take more and more pictures. It was all old-fashioned film cameras back then, nothing digital, so I was learning how to work the camera and develop the photos, too. It was the first time I learned something so fast that was so foreign to me. I kind of shocked myself.

Even your earliest work feels like it’s highlighting the positive aspects of your world. Were you working with the same aim of confronting stereotypes that you are today?

Oh, no. Way in the beginning I was just using the little point-and-shoot camera my dad bought me. I became known at school for just always taking pictures. It wasn’t artistic or anything, I just wanted to constantly catch a moment. I loved the constant challenge of changing subjects, moving subjects, trying to capture whatever moment or emotion you’re after, knowing that your subject is going to do something different in a second. I took pictures of landscapes, of my friends. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the pictures could change how others thought about my community.

You went to Columbia College for journalism, which is in a much whiter part of the city than Englewood. What was it like practicing your craft there?

I was definitely the only Black student. I was used to being in diverse settings and was sort of taken aback that all the other students were white. I got to see how my photos looked compared to theirs. The difference was race, city to suburbs. My photos of my friends and my neighborhood were these kids’ only exposure to kids who didn’t look like them. It was my first time — more or less — being designated as the representative of Black people from the South Side of Chicago.

I remember feeling estranged from my class, and that made me want to get as technically superior as I could. I remember feeling like the subject matter — the emotion of my photos — was always dismissed, and it always boiled down to a critique of the photos’ technical aspects. So I had to let it go and use those photography classes as a time to master understanding my equipment.

Can you tell me a little more about your journey from photography student to photographer-activist?

In 2008, I got a Nikon D-80 for my birthday. I had been working as a development associate at a nonprofit and hadn’t taken photos for about seven years. That Nikon got me out and taking photos again. I got involved with community organizations like Resident Association of Greater Englewood and taught a youth journalism program at the local library. I had a whole bunch of friends who were performers, and I started documenting their performances. One friend opened up for Wu-Tang and I documented that. Another friend asked me if I could take photos of her while she was on tour in France. That’s when it just really started to amaze me where photography could take you.

I got comfortable enough to stop taking just landscapes and start taking portraits of Englewood residents — some neighbors but most strangers. After Spike Lee’s movie came out I thought, “Nah. I’ve got all these pictures that show Englewood in a completely different way. I’m going to use photography as my platform to expand other people’s social awareness.”

What are your working on now?

Right now I’m moving toward video. I want to have a video collage showing a week in Englewood at different times of the day, and I want to project it on the two empty walls of the abandoned building on 63rd and Halsted. I think it’s important to make quality art accessible to communities. It has to be outside of galleries. It has to reach people who wouldn’t come to the gallery.

More generally, I want to show and remind people of the humanity that exists in abundance within these communities. Videos and photographs stick in our minds and give us evidence to believe what we want to believe about a person or neighborhood. I would like for there to be another way to look at Englewood and communities like it. I don’t want it to be visually associated with crime and poverty. Because when you label a neighborhood that way, you’re labeling the people in that neighborhood. It’s dehumanizing. I want to make it so that when you Google “Englewood” and other neighborhoods like it, these positive images will start popping up.

We’ve entered a political era where bigotry and hatred are on the rise. How do you see art figuring into the resistance?

It was disturbingly painful to see that there’s a large group of people in our country who really hold onto some very damaging, hurtful stereotypes and beliefs about other people in the country who don’t look like them. Now more than ever it’s important to challenge that, and I think art is just a great conduit to expand people’s social ideas and constructs in a way that a conversation or a debate or an argument doesn’t allow. Sometimes art can come in and create a safer space to communicate a different opinion or viewpoint and allow you to interact with it.

I think a lot of the resistance right now is bridging the gaps between understanding and having people consider other people’s point of view. My contribution is to offer a visual narrative showing the humanity of different marginalized, othered groups.

We are the experts of our neighborhood. We can tell our own stories. We can be beautiful.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/when-selfies-are-a-radical-act-9dc6dcedb44d/ Fri, 22 Jan 2016 06:00:57 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=9174 Read more]]> 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.

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