The selfie from Akhenaten to Tracey Emin

If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it.  ‘Past interest in the genre,’ James Hall tells us in his introduction to this cultural history, ‘is overshadowed by the obsession with self-portraiture during the last 40 years.’ What he could not have foreseen was that self-portraiture would feature in the mainstream news as never before over the last six months or so.

Firstly, the Oxford English Dictionary announced that ‘selfie’ was their word of the year for 2013, spawning a noisy debate about photographic self-portraiture. Next, David Cameron, Barack Obama and Helle Thorning-Schmidt were spotted taking a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service — an act that merited global news coverage. And throughout this time the National Portrait Gallery in London has been pursuing a high-profile campaign to save a late Van Dyck self-portrait from export, a campaign which, thanks to the Duchess of Cambridge, has now reached the pages of Hello!

Topical it might be, but modish this book is not. Ranging from Akhenaten’s chief sculptor to Tracey Emin and drawing on art-historical, historical, philosophical and literary sources covering the three-and-a-half millennia of the intervening period, this is a stimulating and demanding book that requires an equally serious engagement from any reader.

Hall has devised a Linnaean system of classifying self-portraits, neatly dovetailing types with a chronology that begins in earnest with medieval manuscripts, looks at the development and use of mirrors, the artist’s social standing and the many purposes, artifices and psycho-dramas into which this most apparently straightforward genre can blossom.

The basic questions addressed in this book are the why and how of self-portraiture, and ranging widely in time and medium from the Christ-like image of Dürer and a gorgeous Artemisia Gentileschi to the ceramic jug portrait of Paul Gaugin, the multiple Antony Gormleys and the bizarre photograph of John Coplans that reduces him to a box with a couple of antennae, Hall’s work explores a series of case studies which seeks not so much to answer these questions as to identify the highlights, connections and points of departure in an evolving story.