Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The self-portrait and the disappearance of the photographer.

There sure are a lot of self-portraits on the Internet. Okay, perhaps I am a little late on that observation. Everyone takes “selfies” nowadays.

See someone’s photo, or more accurately their “image,” online? Can you see both of their hands? If yes, then perhaps someone else took their photo. But then there is all this using a mirror. Is the person holding a smartphone in one of their hands? Then they are using a mirror. See any backwards writing in the background?

So all this begs the question in me, “What happened to the photographer?” Some of us remember the day when we paid a person to take our photograph, the ones that appeared on the wall in our parents’ bedroom or in the hallway. Some of us remember when the tourists would ask the locals, “Can you take our picture?” while handing them the camera.

The locals would gladly fumble with the camera and take a picture that was all too often fuzzy and contained more feet than smiles. The tourists grimaced days later when they saw the developed and printed pictures. Oh well. It was a fun vacation.

When I graduated high school, my mother took me into town to a photographer’s studio. My high school yearbook photos were awful (really). A photographer did the job right.

What happened to the photographers? Selfies are inexpensive. We get what we pay for.