The current fad of young people taking snaps of themselves in the bathroom continues to puzzle me.
Typically they use their little toy ‘smartphones,’ which generally have a sort of hole at the back, through which they can shoot a dim photo.
What is it about bathrooms that they find so alluring? And what happens to the snaps afterwards? Do these youngsters paste them into a scrapbook or photograph album? Make postcards? They are most unappealing.
J H JOHNSON
I am reminded of my old friend James Hervey Johnson, onetime city tax assessor and papaya fancier in San Diego. For most of his life he snapped a picture of himself nearly every day. Many of these he pasted into a photo album.
I suggested to Hervey that he mount an exhibition of this lifetime cavalcade in one of the new avant-garde galleries in La Jolla or the Gaslamp Quarter, but he couldn’t be bothered.
This is before we had toy phones that could snap pictures. Hervey never photographed himself in a bathroom, I believe.
Author: Ian Stuart Dowdy
Ian Ambrose Stuart Dowdy is a retired portrait painter and knows quite a bit about art. Today he can be found giving art advice on the steps of the Art Students League, or shopping for new brushes across the street at Lee’s.
