“Book Descriptions: We are living through an epidemic of narcissism, or so we are told. Technology has made us self-obsessed, and this tendency may well be the death of us. But is our self-concern not warranted? Rather than an excess of vanity, what if we regard ourselves so frequently and with such intensity because we do not know who we are or what we are becoming?
By returning to the original myth of Narcissus, and the flower from which he takes his name, this book presents an alternative reading of narcissism and the selfie, arguing against a moralising subgenre of cultural criticism that suggests our self-obsession will be our downfall.
That may be so. But what if the selfie was not a symbol of stasis but an expression of a desire for transformation? And what might we become after we have rid ourselves of the cloistered self-images forced upon us by contemporary capitalism?
Beginning in the Renaissance with Albrecht Dürer, travelling via Rembrandt and Caravaggio to photographers and celebrities like Lee Friedlander and Hervé Guibert, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Narcissus in Bloom explores the rise of the self-portrait through cultures high and low, arguing that it is a sense of subjective indeterminacy that has disturbed us for centuries.” DRIVE
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