Giuseppe Sciarra writes about his series Against the Digital Narcissus.
The face that refuses to become a selfie
We live in the age of permanent exposure.
The face has become a brand, identity a display window.
Every day millions of images construct a polished, filtered and marketable version of ourselves. The selfie is no longer just a photograph: it has become a social device that demands we exist through the gaze of others.
The photographic project “Against the Digital Narcissus” emerges as an act of sabotage.
Artist and filmmaker Giuseppe Sciarra, in collaboration with photographer Priscilla Nutshell, created a series of black-and-white images that challenge the logic of contemporary self-representation.
The face does not reveal itself. It hides, multiplies, fractures.
Covered eyes. Split identities.
Bodies escaping their own image.
This is not a self-portrait.
It is a visual performance against the pathological narcissism of the digital age. The project starts from a simple and radical question:
What remains of identity when we stop performing ourselves?
Within social media culture, individuals are constantly pushed to become content. Personal imagery turns into a form of symbolic currency: visibility, validation, recognition.
Yet this continuous exposure generates a paradox.
The more we show ourselves, the more complexity we risk losing.
For this reason the work does not celebrate the face. It destabilizes it.
The title itself is already a declaration:
I am not one.
Identity is not a stable object.
It is a fragile territory, full of contradictions.
Through distortions, movements and visual obstructions, Sciarra places his own body at the center of the work, interrupting the visual grammar of social media imagery.
The result is a photographic series that seems to sabotage the very idea of the selfie. These images do not ask to be shared.
They ask to be looked at with discomfort.
In a time that constantly pushes us to turn ourselves into images,
“Against the Digital Narcissus” attempts the opposite:
to break the mirror.
Giuseppe Sciarra
A photographic series by Giuseppe Sciarra in collaboration with Priscilla Nutshell
Giuseppe Sciarra (b. 1983, San Giovanni Rotondo) is an Italian director, author, and multidisciplinary artist. Since 2013, he has developed a career spanning cinema, writing, and visual arts, investigating themes of identity, marginality, and self-representation. His works navigate between autobiography and symbolic language, with a particular focus on the dynamics of trauma, bullying, and contemporary narcissism.
