Recently, I visited Yulia Stoshek’s art foundation, and an entire floor was dedicated to artists’ diaries. I noticed one very simple but striking video work, where the artist created a stop-motion video from photos on their phone. It had everything: screenshots of bills, navigation apps, video calls, and just random photos. To me, this video is interesting because it speaks to what my entire generation understands and feels: all our memory, our whole life, important people, and memories are most often stored in photographs.
We often take selfies. Very often we take selfies in mirrors. Usually in the mirrors of our private rooms or elevators. Sometimes we check how our clothes look, sometimes we express emotions and instantly send the photos to friends or loved ones. Sometimes we want to look sexy in the reflection, sometimes funny. Occasionally, someone else appears beside us: relatives, colleagues, lovers, friends. Sometimes strangers in the mirrors of the metro or supermarkets.
I find this observation interesting and quite fruitful because, if you honestly piece together all the selfies in mirrors (even those we never intended to show publicly), from the portraits of our reflections and the reflections of our locations and the people around us, you can create a kind of map, draw certain characteristics, and see yourself from the outside.
Once I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, where he interprets women’s self-observation in mirrors in the past:
*“Being born a woman once meant being born to exist in a defined and limited space, dependent on men. A woman’s social presence developed through her ingenuity, cultivated throughout her life under supervision, in a confined space. The cost was a splitting of the woman’s essence in two. A woman must constantly watch herself. She is almost always accompanied by the image of herself. Walking through a room or mourning her father’s death, she almost inevitably imagines herself: here she walks, here she cries. From her earliest childhood, she is trained and persuaded to constantly observe herself.
As a result, she perceives the observer and the observed as two different elements of her identity as a woman.
A woman must constantly monitor what she is and what she does, because how she is seen by others — ultimately, how she is seen by men — plays a fundamental role in whether she achieves what is generally considered female success. Her own sense of being is replaced by how others see her.”*
I cited this passage because after reading Berger, I reflected a lot on my own desire to take selfies. It seemed to me that such self-observation and self-documentation expressed a kind of separation between reality and media. How often we create illusions and substitute concepts using this tool. Sometimes we try to trick ourselves and, through a beautiful photo and some likes, receive a small dose of dopamine, replacing real emotions with illusory ones. Though it doesn’t change our lives. For a while, I even scolded myself for it and forbade myself from doing it.
But then I realized that observing ourselves and taking mirror selfies also speak to a kind of social loneliness. And they are our visual diaries, through which we can, in a sense, analyze our lives.
Interestingly, in my Ukrainian circle, under the influence of the war, the need to take photos has transformed into a kind of necessity. We see our loved ones so rarely that we want, in any way, to capture time and have physical traces of that person.
I’m not sure, but it seems that the number of selfies in elevators was lower before the war. Or perhaps they carried a different character.
Maybe because earlier, people were constantly around me, and the need for mirror selfies was much smaller: my youth, tiredness, playfulness, or closeness with someone was often documented naturally by my friends. There was also no constant feeling of missing the moment. When parting from someone close, we knew we’d see them in a few days.
Today we don’t know when we’ll see each other next.
Thus, the process of self-documentation has acquired a logical meaning and justification in my mind, especially if we compare the habits of photographing and documenting life in Ukraine and Germany. Here, people rarely take photos. Respect for copyright is so high that you feel afraid to photograph the people around you, even if you know them. The culture of taking selfies together simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps it happens in private circles, and those photos never leave the gallery of their phones, so I wouldn’t know about it.
What can help us preserve the memory of someone’s presence? I’m interested in the theme of memory. Smells fade, tastes are forgotten, music remains. Pencil notes or drawings in our albums, fingerprints, stones, or pressed plants — but our main memory is activated when we watch videos, photos, or listen to audio recordings. And yet, photographs are the easiest and fastest way. At a time when, for many Ukrainians, the sense of a physical home has transformed into a metaphorical “my home – my people”, and distance has lost its previous meaning, we live part of our lives in the reflections of various mirrors, alone or with others, and these reflections are the mirror diaries of this time and our generation.
Maybe one day it will change, but for myself, I realized there is meaning in observing our own changes and treating it as a natural transformation of our generation — an adaptation to social loneliness and a source of a vast amount of information about ourselves.