Stranger in Me

The first picture, the selfie, is meant to just show someone in their normal everyday attire and what they would normally do. So that is what I did and tried to just show me during the weekend and what I’m normally doing and what I normally look like. I also added in my poster of the White Sox stadium to show my favorite team and to show what I’m passionate about from an outside perspective when I wear sox gear around. I’m wearing my glasses with a hat just like most days when I show up to class. I’m also wearing my headset which shows maybe the biggest and the most continual thing in my life, and that is gaming. This plays a major impact in my life and is how I met and talk to most of my friends. This is something that has been a part of my life since I got my PlayStation 2 for my 7^th birthday and played MLB ’08 The Show endlessly. Pictures a look into something deeper and a place to store information. Sontag says in ‘On Photography, In Plato’s Cave’, “They are a grammar, and even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” (Sontag 3) She is saying here that photos are worth something more than just being a photo. She is even saying a picture is worth a thousand words, the old saying, by referring to it as a grammar and the ethics of seeing come through photographs. Photographs speak in many different ways that are deeper than what is on the surface, such as ethics like she refers to photos as. While the grammar part of the quote says that pictures are also like grammar. Unlike ethics, grammar is cut and dry, sometimes what you see is what you get when it comes to pictures, rather than the flipside which is ethics. This leaves a lot of photograph interpretation up to debate. Whether it is a simple scratch the surface photo, like a selfie, or an in depth more telling image, this is more like a self portrait. On the surface how people see you is completely different from how you may really be. That is what selfies have turned into with the popularization of social media.

Selfies have all been changed into self portraits for the purpose of social media and everyone trying to make their lives seem so much better than they are so people will like and comment more and make someone feel good. This example is explained further by Sontag when she says “Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced.” (Sontag 4) This quote from Sontag explains the current use of photos in the world of social media, with them being edited and literally becoming valuable when peoples profiles are starting to get advertised on by companies that are tuned into the online space and can get people to advertise their products on pictures they post if they have a large enough follower counts and engagement numbers. The simple photo has turned into something more, something with a not just a sentimental value, but literal dollar value that is being imposed on social media sites for the world to see. They must be more extravengent, and have more content for people to take in to be worth anything in the online world, than the original idea of what a selfie used to be, from the start of social media and camera phones. So, I tried to bring back the original essence of a selfie and just showed myself on a normal day and looking like I normally would. What do people think of a normal selfie now?

Not as many likes, not as many comments, not as many interactions on social media. Selfies have been evolved into self portraits themselves for the purpose of drawing more attention. As someone who doesn’t post on social media, I left my selfie to be something more normal and just show my normal self and some things I enjoy. These things are important in my life and highlighting them can add to my image of being a normal person, rather than the fake social media selfies that only show someone at their best and doing something cooler than everyone else is doing to drive likes and views. No editing, just me and the normal things I like, baseball and video games while wearing glasses with a hat on backwards talking to my friends. The picture of the White Sox stadium also transitions well into my self portrait and the meaning of a self-portrait. The White Sox are not very interesting on the outside, like my selfie, but when you look deeper, like in a self-portrait, they are so promising and have a lot of upcoming talent that will make them very good for the next decade. This is like a normal relationship with someone. The selfie is just how someone may see me on the outside from being in class with me, but a self-portrait, looking deeper, will show someone’s true potential in being a friend with them or if you would rather not be friends with someone after getting to know them. Self portraits are all about looking deeper into someone’s qualities and personalities and that will help you make a more informed decision based on if someone would be a good friend for you or not. This goes back to my point about the White Sox. On the surface you see a 17 games below .500 record, good for a .438 win percentage, but then if you look deeper at the farm system and the amount of money that is open to be spent on a decent free agent class this offseason, you can see why the fans are passionate and ready to get rolling into winning ways once again.

The self-portrait, the picture with the deeper meaning, is meant to show my former glory days in baseball with a baseball bat and glove, along with my baseball cap. Like in the selfie, I tried to showcase my baseball past in a different light. This time I showcased my past in baseball from a playing perspective rather than a fan perspective. This is a deeper part of my life than my fandom. Someone would not know I used to play baseball and how much of a role this has played in my life from tee ball until the end of high school. This comes back to my definition of a self portrait and how it reveals more about the person on the deeper level than what a selfie shows on the surface. Baseball was a huge part of my life and occupied a lot of my time. When I was done with baseball and a majority of my time was spent working rather than playing baseball it was a huge shift in my life. Working is a lot more draining than playing baseball and I didn’t understand that until after I had quit playing baseball and started my summer job. I had made me sitting on the floor in the self-portrait to show how much harder life is when your done playing games in your childhood. When I would get home from my summer job, even though I liked it, I was still just tired from working for 8 hours that day and waking up at 6:30 in the morning. This shows me growing up from my highschool days and turning into more of a young adult and going to college, which is a more serious schooling experience and ditching the glory days to the past was something I had to do and something most people have to when they grow up and can’t play college or professional athletics. This self portrait is mainly meant to show how I grew up out of my sports phase of being a kid and started to turn into the young adult I am today, more like my in my selfie, playing games and talking with friends when I’m not at school or working. Growing up is hard, but it is a necessary process in life and I am just starting to figure it out. Freshman year, going away to a four year college by myself and not doing well for what is considered normal, but that is a learning experience and now I believe this semester and year will help me grow up out of my high school years and evolve into a young adult that can succeed in life in the future.

Works Cited

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, Dell Publishing,

1977, pp. 3-24. Composition Flipped, writing101.net/flip/wp-content/resources/documents/sontag-in-platos-cave.pdf.