The #AnalogSelfie Project
A Crpyto NFT Project About People and the Ritual of How we Explore and Inhabit the Physical/Digital Worlds of Our Time. (NFT DROP ANNOUNCEMENT COMING SOON) bigtoughfrogman.com
Nine Years ago I sat down on the couch at a friends house in Milwaukee, WI with some magazines, an X-Acto blade and some glue. This was the day I started The #AnalogueSelfie Project. I’d just hitch hiked over from Colorado and was hanging out, killing time, and drawing in my sketchbook before starting work for the summer building hiking trails back in the Rockies. This had been the flow of my life since getting done with art school in Boston. Work in the woods all summer, travel aimlessly and sleep in a tent or my car for awhile and then find some low paying work to float by on until I could get back out on the trails to get paid to explore and be outside. I was focused on photography in school and while living the dirtbag lifestyle and traveling around, I was somewhat critically watching the growth of platforms like Instagram, the continued narcissism of photo tagging on facebook (I’m guilty too!), and the beginnings of what would be a trendy comeback of polaroid style film somewhat akin to people’s love of vinyl records and tapes for music in the modern era of MP3s.
During my summer jobs we would find ourselves in National Parks and during my off season I traveled around a fair bit checking out different attractions across the United States. Later I would go on a similar backpacker style adventure in South East Asia as well. At each iconic spot I visited, I would take my photo or selfie, stand around for a little bit, leave and before the day was out I would be reviewing my shots and posting them to Instagram or Facebook. My actual time spent in these places was likely 5–15 minutes tops and at least a third of that was spent getting photographs. It was as if I didn’t know how to simply enjoy the moment. In this, I wasn’t alone. Far as I could tell this is what most people were doing and often spending even less time than myself. We all do the thing, take our photo proof of having done said thing, get out of there, and then post the proof online.
Before the internet, photographing these experiences made more sense to me. Your family photo, of let us say Death Valley, might have been your only easily accessible visual tool to recall the memory of that experience. Long story short I started to find the ritual of photographing our travels and activities pretty silly. Why take a photo if you can trigger the memory of your trip by looking the place up online? Why go at all if the main goal is the acquire the photo and post it online? Do we do it just to show off our trophy photo? Hell if I know.
That day in Milwaukee I started cutting people out and gluing them in front of different backgrounds and later I would scan them into my computer and edit them into a polaroid to give it a personal authentic feel. They are all sized to 7x7 inch blocks with the polaroid image floating in the middle at the actual size of a real life polaroid. There’s nothing magical about the process. It’s a joke critique on habits that I observe and participate in while traveling. I only made a few that first day but ever since then I’ve gotten the inspiration to sit down and make another 4 or 5 to add to the collection.
After a couple years of making my fake tourist polaroids, as I called them, I began to notice other conceptual trends within the larger context of viewing a bunch of them at once. The privilege of travel/vacation and who gets to engage in it typically; became a present theme for me. I focused in on that for awhile. When a trend of people taking bear and dangerous wildlife selfies popped up on the internet I made a few of those. In a larger recent batch, I included #moonboi’s and one named #FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to tip my hat to the world of crypto that I realized would be a perfect environmental fit for the project.
My intention with the project and what I’ve gotten out of it, is my own. What that is, has evolved over time and it will continue to do so. As a whole it is my critique on how we document and share experiences, and more recently how that has expanded into the digital realm of life. With that said, I mostly just find it entertaining and think you will too.
