Photography: Willem Popelier
Text: Willem Popelier
Design: Willem Popelier
2015
Book of the month November 2022
Visual artist Willem Popelier focuses on popular visual culture, the ubiquitous image and its effects on society. The Do-It-Yourselfie Guide is a small, handy book in English. The cover has the subtitle: The ultimate selfie guide to capture the best version of yourself.
The back of the cover gives even more information:
Willem Popelier analyzed tens of thousands of selfies, thousands of tips and dozens of research articles on selfies for the ultimate selfie guide.
This guide contains 66 rules accompanied by 66 pictures in which Willem Popelier re-enacted some of the most famous selfies on earth. Go and take your own selfie based on rules applied by the stars. You can shine just like them. All you need is a camera, yourself, and a hashtag.
For clarification, the booklet states about selfie:
A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam, and shared via social media.
Willem gives tips based on a number of criteria such as light, distance, facial expression, pose and composition. To illustrate, he added selfies based on selfies of famous people, such as Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. He mentions a few at the back of the book. He also mentions a number of tipsters.
Willem is not only a good photographer, he also turns out to be a good actor. However, by imitating all the famous poses and forms of expression and showing them one after the other, it is not so much the many possibilities that he emphasizes, but the insignificance of the selfie phenomenon.
Willem Popelier will be the guest at Fotokafeine on November 24, 2022. That promises to be a surprising evening. He asks you to bring a cell phone and ID.
The Do-It-Yourselfie Guide is published by BIS and is in the library of Pennings Foundation.