Art Workshop: Selfie Esteem
Saturday 12 November, 1-3pm | Open Eye Gallery | Free, Book Here
The use of beauty filters in social media and selfie editing apps is becoming increasingly common, but editing portraits is nothing new. Should we be worried then about the use of new technologies to alter images? What influence does photography have on beauty standards?
Join artist and philosopher Claire Anscomb for an art workshop to explore the history of portraiture, selfies, and image alteration for beautification. Learn about this history through guided practical activities, from drawing on photographic negatives to the use of photo-editing apps, and discuss the impact of photo-editing on what we judge to be beautiful and vice versa. In doing so, gain an insight into the processes behind different kinds of photo-editing, learn how to spot subtle signs of image alteration, and consider how to balance creative freedom with potential harms relating to self-esteem, self-image, and often exclusionary beauty standards.
Participants will be provided with materials to experiment and make physical and digital images. Please bring a smartphone, along with your favourite social media or editing apps. If you don’t have a device you could bring, tablets will be available to use.
This event is part of the Being Human festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, taking place 10–19 November 2022. Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org.
Bio: Claire was the 2021-22 British Society of Aesthetics Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Liverpool, where she remains an Honorary Research Fellow. In September 2022, she joined De Montfort University as a Lecturer in Fine Art. Her award-winning visual work explores themes surrounding visibility and has been exhibited internationally. Her philosophical work focuses on issues relating to image-making technologies and has been published in academic journals, and awarded the 2021 John Fisher Memorial Prize and 2022 Irene H. Chayes New Voices Award by the American Society of Aesthetics.
Image Credit: Claire Anscomb (image of Proconnesian marble statue of Venus courtesy of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. © The Trustees of the British Museum.)