I almost constantly feel the nagging need to pick up my phone. To check it, to search on it and doomscroll. My for-camera video and photographic self-portraits are a response to what I see. In my home, using my iPhone, I recreate other people’s selfie gestures, follow selfie-making tutorials, I ‘smize’, ‘finger-mouth’ and pronounce “prune” with a speech coach. Prior to this study, I wasn’t much of a selfie-maker, I didn’t have a grasp of the conventions, whilst I was aware of the ‘duck-face pout’, I did not know saying the word “prune” to my camera-phone would help me master it. In this sense, I am learning through doing by following a particular prosumer-image practice.

Combining methods of self-portraiture, reenactment, image-appropriation, and humour, I re-perform the image, for the next image, drawing upon a specific body of imagery sourced from online marketplaces, which I make analogue, repeat bodily, and return to the digital as a new model for being – a process and concept I refer to as: ‘the image as a template for posing’. I also follow verbal templates for being, to augment, transgress and deconstruct posing templates, to make other ways of being imaginable. My embodied remixing of image-templates, selfie-images and selfie-gestures allows me to rethink the manipulation of images and the desire to perform, become or be image, in the digital age.

The artworks created during this research are the foundations for the chapters of the thesis. Chapter One is led by the photographic series Modelling Selfies (In Paper Outfits) it explores the merging of differently dimensioned bodies to consider some of the labour involved in producing and consuming digital images. Chapter Two begins with deconstructed words and leads to a body of video works in which I pronounce terms used in selfie-making with the support of a mentor. The focus of this chapter is less about representation and more about the informational exchange, which underscores the digital age. The third and final chapter of the thesis commences with a number of protracted video works that sit under the title Gestures (for the selfie), this chapter continues to look at the body’s connections to the image, extending the discussion of labour, whilst examining the desire of living up to an image that is out of reach.

The Image as a Template for Posing contributes to, and expands, contemporary thinking about selfie-making, through a practice-led focus. Within my video and photographic self-portraits other peoples' selfie-like images become vehicles for the study of present and ubiquitous digital image-making practices and how these intersect with new modes of subjectivity, representation, and the staging of everyday life. In my artworks I attempt to fit and follow the confines of selfies to examine image-consumption and production systems of exchange, spotlighting the connections and tensions between bodies and images, in the digital age. My project offers a new contribution to contemporary thinking about prosumer ‘self-portraiture’ at the intersections of photography, performance studies and labour.