The process of taking the perfect selfie is by no means an easy one; variables like angle, lighting and choice of background all contribute to the ways in which we try to put our best selves forward in digital spaces. Vincent Ferrané’s latest photo book, IRL Corps, (published by Witty Books) and its associated exhibition (now running at Destin Sensible and Cnap until July 26, 2024) is a new collection of photographs exploring the gulf between the online and real-life spaces that we occupy, foregrounding how our selfies – and indeed, our digital selves – are constructed.
“The initial idea of this project is to question how a body IRL seeks to address the social body through the production of its image and its dissemination on digital social networks,” explains Ferrané. In order to explore these ideas further, his portraits introduce the “staged aspect of self-presentation”. Throughout the images in the series, we see artificial lighting, selfie sticks, even a mobile phone; in an image of David – one of the nine diverse bodies and identities Ferrané documents – we see him looking at his phone camera, presumably to take a selfie. Ferrané presents us with someone who is about to turn themselves into both a subject and object simultaneously.
This division – between being the subject of one of Ferrané’s images, and becoming an object through their own selfies – is emphasized by the ways in which the photographer deploys mirrors in his images “to compose images that further the mise en abyme of the different gazes: that of the subject in their role as image producer and spectator of their own image”. Mise en abyme is the practice of placing the copy of an image within itself, which Ferrané accomplishes in his portrait of Moon (below) by showing them lying on their back, with a mirror creating a reflection that looks off in a different direction.
There’s a complicated political dimension to how we share our bodies online; Ferrané argues that this aspect “emerged in relation to social control […] which rejected the conformity of certain individuals or their social groups”. This tension between the politics of representation – and the democratisation initially promised to us through social media – and Ferrané’s desire to “present one’s self as one is” is something amplified by the project’s relationship to social media.
Ferrané has a complicated relationship with social media. “I am old enough to have known the beginning of social networks and utopian promise they held. Today, one can cast a very critical eye on what they have become, yet small islands of resistance and creation seem to persist.” IRL Corps can be seen as exactly that: an island of resistance and creation, with Ferrane and his subjects challenging the ways in which we understand something that’s become as ubiquitous as the selfie.
For Ferrané, this project both “illustrates the widening gap created by the substantial volume of images that are perpetually consumed and replaced”, while also shining a light on the relevance of the image. It’s this relevance that has shifted over time – as we move from physical to increasingly digital platforms – and what gives IRL Corps its political dimension.
The guiding principle of these images is to allow people to present themselves as they feel they are. In spite of the transparent artificiality of the way Ferrané’s images are staged, the subjects themselves are presented with intimacy and tenderness, and the space to simply exist. But what makes IRL Corps so compelling is that, in presenting its subjects in this way, it reminds us of the fact that – whether IRL or in cyberspace – we still need to fight to exist as ourselves, as Ferrané puts it, to “be a body-subject rather than a photographed-body-object”.
Vincent Ferrané’s IRL Corps is published by Witty Books and is avilable here now. The exhibition is now running Destin Sensible and Cnap until July 26, 2024.
