In the maelstrom of contemporary popular culture and social-media-driven fads, one would think that the selfie’s day in the sun had come and gone. Yet the art form — or genre, or mere habit — remains with us still, as vibrant and as unselfconscious as ever. Intrigued by this, photographers Luisa Dörr and Navin Kala are jointly developing a project they call The Self Promenade, which focuses on tourists from the Chinese mainland who come to Hong Kong’s Avenue of Stars on the Victoria Harbour waterfront both to gawk at celebrity memorials and to photograph themselves doing so — as Kala puts it, “somehow conquering this new world with the ‘I was there’ attitude.” Their photos have the cool observational style of documentary work, yet at the same time real sympathy is generated from capturing people in the midst of the equally detached process of observing themselves.
http://cargocollective.com/luisadorr
