Seriously: Learn to love your selfie

Published 3:24 pm Friday, January 16, 2015

The online satirists at The Daily Currant earned lots of laughs recently when they claimed that Boston’s Emerson College would soon be launching a course on “The Art of the Self Portrait.”

But four months later, a London college is offering a class by almost the exact same name — and this time, it’s no joke. “The course is a theory/practice introduction to photographic self-portraiture,” intones a syllabus for City Lit’s “Art of Self-Portraiture.” “It is conceived for students to improve their critical understanding of the photographic self-portrait, as well as a platform to develop ideas towards the creation of a coherent body of work.”

Mainstream academia seems to understand the selfie as a cultural artifact — and not just a practice in narcissism.

— Herald news services