63

‪The portrait, be it painting, photograph, or drawing, is tightly wound with the advent of the image in the christian west. From imago to icon, from classical painting to photography, the status of the face imprints into the artifact’s matter. What comes out of this historical trajectory may be the slow process of envisaging (the making of the face as a concept of its own, representing the person) as taking autonomous control of the modern subject’s public representation through the self portrait. The destiny of this paradoxical “conquest of the self” expresses itself now in the globalised selfie. Is it an emancipation from the modes of representation, or the submission to hegemonic norms of visibility? Does the selfie overthrow the notion itself of image, and the images’s capacity of being reality’s witness? What does this new regime of the digital figure tell us?‪