A few years ago, our family went to a John Singer exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.  An entire room is dedicated to pictures of one family, the Werthsheimers, a wealthy Jewish family who lived around the turn of the 19th century.  Society commentators of the time chided the family for being presumptuous,, taking on airs of the title and moving out of their social strata by enlisting a portraitist of renown to capture the minutiae of their existence, as if they were royalty. They posed in ostentatious garb and commissioned numerous magnificent pictures of themselves at important events in their lives, a flattery previously reserved for royalty.  The Werthsheimers were scoffed at for being so audacious as to immortalize their moments and preserve themselves for posterity by filling their world with pictures of themselves.  How outrageous!

That was then; this is now.  The year, 2011.

I am greeted at the door of a friend’s home.  There is a beautiful, glossy, 12-by-12 picture of her children dressed up as figures of the nativity scene.  Her littlest one plays the role of Baby Jesus.  This is the first Christmas decoration, front & center, as we enter the house.  We then pass by a long wall of pictures of the family, tastefully & artistically rendered.  This leads to a large family room with, as  you might guess, more large family pictures. 

I wonder how it affects human development to walk, daily, through a gauntlet of ourselves, smiling beautifully, as the major ornamentation of our world.  I wonder  how it teaches our children to view themselves in relation to other people or to whether it might inhibit our thinking about others at all.

It is no wonder that we have some difficulty viewing other people as anything other than peripheral to our story.  Other people remain important as potential observers, viewers, and admirers of our pictures of ourselves.  But who are they, these observers, these other people?  As we focus our cameras, we politely ask them to step aside and not intrude on another image we’re adding to our collection.  We now have the capability and freedom to cut other people out after the fact, if some blunderer accidentally intrudes into our creative memory.  So we see ourselves with flattering mirrors all around us and we are in the center of it all, left admiring our own reflections. 

It used to be there was a flush of excitement when as an elementary school kid we could pick ourselves out in a montage or class photo.  “The camera caught me!”, we might feel in a surge of self-importance that is kept in check in the context of looking at 26 other kids with crooked bangs or droopy socks and awkward smiles or budding confidence reflected on their collected faces.

Today, I can choose a backdrop, get a Hollywood glossy treatment and a whole pack of large images of my son or daughter to give to friends and family.  These modern renditions eclipse the rather shoddy and insignificant class picture where my child looks goofy, and it’s really just a group of 2nd graders instead of a close-up glamour pose to highlight my child’s remarkable attributes, so one can pick him out of a line-up in a talent agency.

This is all for $16.95.  It’s expected, vital, an American right.  We deck our halls and anyone else’s we can think of with these monuments to ourselves.  A culture of home videos starring who?  Us, of course.  We wish we could get someone else to come watch them with us. I actually had a friend send me her birthing video, unsolicited.  Her husband narrated two hours of the bloody baby birth miracle and she arranged for us to meet for lunch so we could see the pictures together.  Over pasta.  The couple had gotten 30 some copies and sent them to all their friends to share the joy.

Now I’m the first to cry in awe over the miracle of new life, but what is wrong with this picture?  Something is missing from the frame.  Something essential.

I took rudimentary drawing lessons from a wonderful artist named Deanna Nelson.  She’s the person who taught me this word called “perspective.”  When it comes to capturing something you see, there is figure and ground.  You give the focus of your study its depth and dimensionality by also including other objects for contrast and interest.  These other elements help you see the truth, the whole that’s more than the sum of its parts as well as the specifics of the one thing.  One rose is defined more clearly among the bouquet of flowers or against the hard backdrop of a book or the pale, flushed cheek of a young woman.  Perspective is dependent upon the surrounding canvas.  Perspective is drawn from contrast & otherness.  

This is simply a reflection of how we’ve shifted into a narcissistic worldview and frame of reference.  We’ve reduced other people to background images, a part of the scenery, or the person taking the picture.  If we’ve been the centerpiece of our images and imagination from an early age, how do we even begin to develop curiosity and interest in others  much less build reciprocal relationships that work?

If the icon is me, we might need a new iconoclastic movement.