3 what they dont say but do reveal 7 kardashian

3. What they don’t say (but do reveal).
7: Kardashian: revealing yet unrevealing.
The bizarre side of the mirror is Kim Kardashian’s
now-famous picture of her ass and side-boob [7] .
The pose is utterly banal; she’s like millions of others
admiring themselves in mirrors, trying to show some
part of their body to best advantage. Kardashian goes
a step further. As she gets everything to show just
right while admiring her own image in the phone, the
third meaning that pops out is not her body. It’s how
weirdly stage-managed the scene is. Her body is
blatantly visible while her décor is carefully blocked
off by Japanese screens. Her ass-crack is
intentionally outlined, but she doesn’t want us to see
her sofa. Kim has even authored four rules for the
perfect selfie: “Hold your phone high [as you shoot];
know your angle; know your lighting; and no
duckface!”
5/9

Geraldo: self-regarding.
Equally idiotic winds of third meaning blow through other
recent celebrity selfies. Seventy-year-old Geraldo Rivera’s
selfie shows him gazing at his own stomach muscles in a
bathroom mirror [8] , naked but for a low-slung towel. Unlike
third meanings that tell us something new, selfies like this
confirm what we already know. (Here, that Geraldo is a self-
involved publicity-loving hound dog.) It’s no different from
those celebrity porn films that are self-released accidentally-
on-purpose, either to remake images or out of simple
sociopathology. Then there’s the subcategory of what I call the Selfie Sublime: an
extraordinary moment, photographed to incorporate the shooter’s own astonishment. We see
it in astronaut Aki Hoshide’s selfie hovering in space [9] , his silver helmet showing none of his
features, the Sun behind him, the Earth reflected in his visor. In its counterpart, the Selfie
Terrible Sublime, we see not beauty but agony. On December 11, Ferdinand Puentes
photographed himself in the beautiful blue ocean off the shore of Molokai, in Hawaii, seconds
after his small passenger plane crashed and began to sink [10] . The look on his face is
spectral, terrified, ecstatic, eerie, vertiginous. This is someone photographing himself lost and
imperiled, recording and sending off what he knows might be his final moments. After being
rescued, Puentes said that when they heard sirens and bells going off in the plane and the
water coming up fast, “everyone knew what was going on.” While looking at the selfie, he
repeated, “It hurts.” We know this from his selfie.
9: Hoshide: space selfie. Photo: Uncredited/AP2013
Soon, from somewhere in the digital universe, came
comparisons to Puentes’s with selfies taken by gamer avatars
in Grand Theft Auto 5 [11] that depict themselves with
catastrophes. Here, people have created fictional figures that
mimic what we do, and amazingly enough, the genre’s
earmarks are often present in their avatars’ self-shots: the
telltale raised shoulder, the close-in view, the bad camera
angle, and the stare.