The Parque Lage's Mermaid

The Politics of Photographing One's Own Body in Social Media Networks

Abstract

Analysis of the relationship between the current forms of the photographic portrait of the human face and body, as practiced for display on social networks, and the forms of presentation assumed by current political personalities. The guiding thread of the article is a return of Walter Benjamin’s sketch of the history of photography in the early 1930’s. There we look for elements to situate the new practices through similarities and differences of these with what is proposed in terms of phases and attitudes towards the act of photographing the human face, in the essay “Little History of Photography”. Themes from the essay “The work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility”, by the same author, and from observations on the relationships between everyday life and digital communication technologies, by authors like Jonathan Crary, will be brought up for discussion.