On a recent visit to Vietnam, I frequently encountered young people, doing cosplay—as soldiers, colonial maidens, ancient queens. Spiritual gardens, French colonial buildings, and art museums functioning as sets for stills of themselves in some imaginary film. Recently, the cricketer Prithvi Shaw was allegedly attacked and his car trashed because he refused a selfie to an influencer. A few days later, singer Sonu Nigam almost got thrown off a stage as the organiser insisted on a selfie.  It’s not surprising because not just the world, and time, but even people now serve as backdrops or accessories for photos of ourselves.

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The image is not something made for us to gaze upon to reflect on ourselves. We ourselves are continuously creating and re-creating ourselves as images—as if we might disappear if we are not constantly a photograph. We are the centre, we are the point of the image. 

If popular culture teaches us something it is that nothing has only one meaning. This self-centering can be powerful —as with young women framing themselves as subjects of desire rather than being framed by men as objects of desire. Someone told me that when young women ask young men to take pictures of them it is also an act of intimacy, an invitation to look, on their terms. There is a sense of exchange here. But, when everything is a backdrop, does everything else also become a thing for the taking—other people’s ideas, emotions, work? If we control all images, what happens to the vulnerability of uncertainty—in love, work, friendship, politics? What happens to the tenderness of looking, paying attention to another?  Does the sole responsibility and control of loving ourselves become a tad lonely? To be the special one in every context, the centre of every picture, might be less pleasurable than we imagine.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com