Selfies are how teenagers and young adults mainly communicate these days. Snapchat is one of the most popular and most used apps, which is mostly just sending selfies and pictures to your friends. The Saatchi Gallery is about a 3-4 minute walk from the Sloan Square Underground Station and located on Kings Road in Chelsea. The gallery currently has an exhibit called "From Selfie to Self-Expression," which has a few different galleries that has selfies with different themes.
The first floor of the gallery has mainly celebrity selfies, and selfies that might have gone viral on social media. Of course, the iconic selfie of Ellen at the Oscars is displayed in this section. The photo seen below on the far left is really interesting because it's just someone holding a phone that has a picture of Kim Kardashian but it really looks like it could be her face.
some of the selfies displayed on the first floor of the gallery
There was even a section of the museum that displayed some photos from people who entered a contest. People were able to express themselves through a selfie and submit it. To enter you just had to It was probably one of the most interesting parts of the gallery because they were all very real pictures meaning that they really showed the emotion behind the photo.
"This international competition offered a chance to be part of a worldwide cultural phenomenon and for entrants to express themselves, by exploring and advancing the creative potential of the selfie today," according to the Saatchi Gallery website.
a few of the pictures that were entered into the contest
Something that made this museum unique and not just another museum was that it was extremely interactive. There was one room that had a camera that would zoom into your face, kinda like a CCTV. Outside of the room the plaque with the description about it was, "twelve independent robotic cameras zoom in to amplify live images with up to 35x magnification. The computerized surveillance systems, trained on by the public, use face recognition algorithms to detect the presence of participants."
Another interactive part of the museum that was my favorite was there were screens with pictures of people. Every screen had a phone next to it where you could "like" the picture and it would tell you how many likes that picture has gotten.
the pictures displayed and the phone where you can "like" the picture
In one room of the museum, the whole room was filled with a bunch of selfies. It was amazing to just stand there and stare at all the pictures and realize how many pictures there actually were covering those walls.
one of the walls covered in selfies, and of course I had to take a selfie of my own
On the Saatchi Gallery museum website they describe this museum as the world's #1 museum on social media, and it's probably so popular because not only is it interactive but it's also something that is relevant nowadays. A lot of people are really into selfies, or just expressing themselves through a picture, which is a great way to express yourself without using words. Selfies and pictures are an amazing form of art these days.
