Look at me!, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

from 20/11/2014 to 14/03/2015

Every day millions of people all over the world share photos of themselves. Making selfies is a hype originating from the digital media, Internet and social media. But is this need for self-imaging indeed unique to our time?

The Tropenmuseum has explored its rich historical collection of photographs and discovered astonishing similarities with more recent self-portraits.

A visual journey of discovery along portraits from three different periods

Self imaging in three periods

View images by Woodbury & Page and other 19th-century photo studios never exhibited before; famous studio portraits by James Barnor, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé; and contemporary self-portraits by artists like Iké Udé, Ni Haifeng and Hélène Amouzou. The portrait photos can be divided into three periods:

19th-century colonial Indonesia;
the independence period in the 1950s and 1960s in West Africa;
and the multicultural West of today.


Link to the exhibition website