The term “social photo” can be limiting because all photos are social in a sense (a critique equally applicable to the term “social media”).
To only apply traditional aesthetics to social photos is to disrespect the integrity of vision of those making and seeing the images, a vision not rooted in traditional photographic judgements and justifications. While those applying photo criticism to the social photo attempt to place those images within the established rules of the professional photographic community, the vast majority of people holding cameras have little interest in those professional norms or success metrics. The everyday social photograph fails at being “good” in the same way as an art photograph fails at conveying odor.
So popular was the picturesque ideal in the late eighteenth century that it set off a type of tourism in which wealthy vacationers took to the European countryside in search of landscapes reminiscent of picturesque paintings. But given how the picturesque was a constructed form of beauty, not scenery in its natural form, some tourists carried with them a device designed to provide a view of landscapes as if they were picturesque paintings. It was sometimes called the black mirror, or, more commonly, the Claude glass, after Claude Lorrain. The device was typically pocket-size, with convex, gray-colored glass. When viewers looked into it, the convex shape pushed more scenery into a single, central, focal point, and the color of the glass changed the tones to be more pleasing to the eyes by the standards of the contemporary picturesque paintings, which had a limited color palette. The constructed, mediated image was thought to be even more beautiful than reality.
What’s most striking about the Claude glass was how it was used: rather than looking directly at the landscape they had traveled to see, tourists would stand with their back to the landscape and view its reflection for a moment in the device.
The selfie captures how the self has long been understood in sociology, offering the third-person mirror view that Charles Horton Cooley articulated more than a century ago with his foundational concept of the “looking-glass self.” His definition of the self is sometimes summed up like this: I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am.