It has become commonplace to speak of our current reality as “a time like no other.”

It is fashionable for columnists to devote the first column of the new year to resolutions — those kept and those broken. For the record, I’ve done both.

As a photographer, I always assumed my interests were odd. My preferred subjects were dilapidated buildings, rusted metals and abandoned spaces. I love detailed closeups of ghost phrases — slogans and ads painted on crumbling surfaces that are still just visible to the eye, decades after the products were available. Driving through the countryside I will often pull over to photograph a collapsed shed, a rusted sign or a crumbling wall. 

Recently I Googled the term “selfie” and determined quickly that no further research into the matter was needed. What I found were endless varieties of scantily clad self-representations, with very little analysis about why anyone would transmit these images about themselves, or what the images were meant to suggest other than an easily accessible sexuality occurring in epidemic proportions (79 million images on Instagram alone that fall into this category).