Spring2016-Udelson

Regarding the Selfie: Excellences and Perfections and the Implications of Pain

Jon Udelson

Sontag’s second book on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), is as much about the complicated nature of bearing witness to suffering—mediated through time, distance, screens, and media—as it is about the contemplation of that suffering. These acts of contemplation, Sontag suggests, are made manifest not only through private acts of interpretation but also through an embedded, cultural (though not collectively conscious) understanding that “[i]deologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts [and] feelings.”¹ This stance is (tacitly) proposed as counter to the stance Sontag establishes in her first book on the subject, On Photography (1977), in which she ends her series of essays with the call for an “ecology of images”²: a methodological orientation toward photographic production that would seek to ally the visual reproductions with the actuality—conceptually, emotionally, etc.—of what those reproductions sought to portray. It seems, however, that while Sontag (along with many of us) has abandoned this notion of photography as approximating objective actuality, we might today consider the affordances of the artist who might overtly play with the idea of both encapsulation and this triggering of predictable thoughts in order to perform work within an ecology not of image but of imagistic function, especially one that leans on the imagistically violent in order to make meaning.

In this short essay, then, I attempt three interrelated tasks: introduce and contextualize Amalia Ulman’s Instagram photo-project Excellences & Perfections; identify complications with the viewing and interpreting of the project; and suggest the ways in which the portrayal of the self-referencing violence (both psychic and otherwise) of the climactic photos in the collection simultaneously “encapsulate[s] common ideas of significance” and challenges our understanding of private interpretive acts.

April 2014 saw the first Instagram upload of Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections³ project, a series of satirical photographs seeking to “document her [Ulman-as-character’s] attempt to make it as an “It Girl” in Los Angeles.”⁴ The project, which lasted approximately six months, comprises about 175 images, all of which are staged and include a large number of photographs in the selfie style. These images include shots of Ulman’s body, dress, metropolitan excursions, lead up to breast surgery, food, textual aphorisms, etc., and most of the images feature color palettes largely comprised of pastels and earth tones. When clicked on and viewed individually, these images are accompanied by text that further belies the project’s satirical intention: for instance, a picture of a spread of prepared food is accompanied by the text “Cooked for my whole family todaaaayy so exhausted now omg…”⁵ These images are, through Instagram’s commenting function, then also accompanied by textual reactions by those following Ulman’s feed or those who have happened upon it. At what might be considered the climactic portion of the project and foreshadowed by a boot-clad woman holding a gun and a black bag full of money, Ulman documents her character self undergoing a crisis that sees her losing weight, appearing sullen, posing with a gun herself, and crying in front of the camera of her phone. The third and last arc of the project sees the Ulman character recovering from her crisis, thanking those who stood by her, and participating in actions conducive of a more “healthy” state of mind. The project concludes with a shot of a black and white rose, tagged “THE END.”⁶

Sontag contemplates the ways in which photographs always fail to be the transparent presentation of images and scenes they represent. Indeed, Ulman’s scenes represent only “common ideas of significance.” The by-now commonplace story of the “It Girl’s” superficial existence, which we cherish for its depiction of a self-aggrandizement and through which we’ve developed a joy for mocking, gives way to a sense of despair, ruin, and redemption. Sontag concedes that the sedimented function of photography as the medium exists in our minds “to show” us “exactly what was before the camera’s lens,” and thus to “count as evidence.”⁷ However, Sontag writes also of how “to photograph is to frame, to frame is to exclude” and how it “has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent.”⁸ Inherent in Sontag’s claim is the suggestion that what is outside the photograph, i.e. outside the conceptual “frame” of the image, may be understood alongside what is contained inside that frame. It would seem that while one risks falling victim to misrepresentation in attempting to understand what lies outside that frame—the project of “regarding” references a subjective act of interpretation—to not consider what lies outside is to passively guarantee that victimhood.

Knowingly reading into the photograph that which Excellenes & Perfections is effectively, though not actually, “excluding” is to consider the ecological dimensions of any collection of photography understood as “art.” Excellences & Perfections ultimately reveals itself to directly encompass and reference a time period during which the project was taken to be “documentary.” An aspect of this dimension, in Ulman’s case, then, is the exploitation and expanding of the concept of framing, as well as the affordances of the social media platform in which “hangs” the gallery of its images. Particularly, that Ulman’s project “is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict”⁹ becomes part of the project that can be regarded not only along digitally spatial frames (though physical exhibitions of Ulman’s project will go on display at Electronic Superhighway and Whitechapel Gallery in London) but temporal ones as well.

This notion of temporality becomes increasingly complex when, as Chancy points out in a discussion of trauma that draws heavily on Sontag, we consider how photography “externalizes and objectifies its subjects in an effort to “fix” or transcend time, to keep the past alive in an ongoing present.” For Chancy, this process serves to reference the past event depicted as existing perpetually, as being continuously “alive” and happening, thus highlighting the poignancy of the past event portrayed.¹⁰ However, the past that is Excellences & Perfections references a timeline, which, in itself, becomes an aspect of the ongoing present that the project seeks to fix or transcend; in other words, it becomes part of the frame to be interpreted. The depicted experiencing of trauma is made representationally manifest through that pain which is “repeated after its forgetting,”¹¹ evidenced by Ulman’s character’s perceived despondency and tacit threat of self-inflicted violence. A viewing of this pain weighs both on the viewers who came to the project as it originally unfolded and us viewers who came to the project after its completion. There can be no “It-Girl” archetype without an expectant audience that can, with little prompting, understand the arc of such a genre-d (and gendered) depiction.

Sontag writes that as modern citizens we are “consumers of violence as spectacle…schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity”; we are a people, in other words, “who will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.”¹² In many ways Ulman’s project hinges on its invitation to the audience to contemplate the depicted life events of the character therein. In doing so, the project displays both an awareness of this cynicism and a need to address it by meeting it with first subterfuge, and then revelation. It’s no doubt worth mentioning, then, that the first video Ulman posted after Excellences & Perfections’s conclusion is of the Ulman character first appearing to pose for us, only to settle into a stare.¹³

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1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003. 86.

2. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Picador, 2001.

3. Ulman, Amalia. Excellences & Perfections. This photo project can be found along with more of Ulman’s materials here: https://www.instagram.com/amaliaulman/. 2014. Web.

4. Sooke, Alastair. “Is this the first Instagram masterpiece?” The Telegraph. 2016. Web.

5. Ulman. “Untitled Photograph.” Excellences and Perfections. https://www.instagram.com/p/p7PyFdFVxb/?taken-by=amaliaulman

6. Ulman. “The End – Excellences & Perfections.” https://www.instagram.com/p/s67XD2FV5l/?taken-by=amaliaulman.

7. Sontag, 2003. 47.

8. Ibid. 46.

9. Ibid. 46.

10. Chancy, Myriam J.A. “On the Edge of Silence.” In Pressley-Sanon, Toni and Saint-Just, Sophie eds. Raoul Peck: Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination. Lexington Books, 2015. 111.

11. Ibid. Caruth, Cathy qtd. in Chancy. 107.

12. Sontag, 2003. 111.

13. Ulman. “Untitled Video.” https://www.instagram.com/p/uOTpmjFVwM/?taken-by=amaliaulman.