Blogs, websites, and identity

In Camera, one of the songs on her latest album, CharliXCX sings:When the camera's onI can be anything that I wanna beAnd I can feel the things I don't normally feelWhen I heard these words, I couldn’t help but think about them from an art history perspective. Portraits create an image. Portraits can and have been used to express power, identity, occasion, the significance of a moment. So too can we create images with cameras: we get to decide how we pose for a selfie, how we frame the image of the flower we see that we want to capture in our minds.⁂ ⁂ ⁂One of the biggest transformations in my thinking with regard to images this year is that when I see someone take a photo I increasingly ask “why?” I was in the National Gallery of Scotland on Saturday looking at a Monet painting, Poplars on the Epte. I sat down and spent several minutes studying the painting. In that time, a few people came to have their photo taken with the painting. I exchanged a smile with one person posing for…