My Polaroid Selfies from Melinda Camber Porter is a book that will appeal on some level to many people. Between the selfies and the introductory essays at least one aspect will grab you. Fortunately, I was intrigued by all of it.

The essays are wonderful, providing both a history of the Polaroid and the connection between Polaroid selfies and the current selfie phenomenon. Perhaps one big difference between what Porter was doing and what the majority of contemporary selfie-takers is purpose. Porter was intrigued, more so for herself than anyone else, at what the face can tell about a person, how a face might or might not be an actual reflection of what is going on internally. For the large part today's selfie-takers are doing so to display themselves and to present an image outward that quite often is knowingly contrary to what is going on inside. Reflection vs self-promotion in other words. yes, you can tell I think selfies have become far too superficial the vast majority of the time.

I have noticed some people would have preferred more context with each photo. While I understand their interest I don't share it. I was not looking for a memoir or a biography of Porter. The inscriptions were sufficient for me to look at the pictures and try to look into her mind. Unsuccessfully no doubt but still very interesting. Finding an expression that seemed to say, to me, melancholy with an inscription that might be either happy or at least not particularly reflective in nature. The inscriptions were short, ranging from "thinking of sex with kindly heterosexuals" to "well---". The ones without inscriptions were, once I had been through the book a couple times, even more fun. I felt I knew her, or at least the version of her I created from her pictures, so I could read, in my own mind, what the expressions meant when there were no inscriptions.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in the progression of self-portraiture in the recent past as well as those who like to fill in the stories, or at least the feelings, around photographs. In this case, many photographs of the same face.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Unfortunately, I had expected something completely different from this book than what I got. I had thought this would be a book filled with selfies from a bunch of different experiences and stories to go along with each photo. Instead it was a book with almost the same picture throughout the entire thing.

The beginning offered up more content with the author's take on Polaroids and how she become interested in taking photos. This however, wasn't enough to keep my interest. I also think the pictures should fill out one entire book instead of this just being the first volume of three.

Maybe a physical copy of the book would have been more pleasing to view, but an e-book didn't hold my attention as I had hoped it would.

Interesting the selfies from 80’s, Nice pictures from a young woman who share her past memories

I'm not entirely sure what I expected from this book, but I can safely say what hope I had for it to show more depth than a modern day Instagram account was dashed quickly. The Polaroids in Camber Porter's journal were all so alike that at one point I bookmarked all the pages that had groups of photos to verify that even her shirt had changed in them.

How, then, did it even get a three star rating from me? Actually, it was the list of her other work towards the end of the book... and some of those pieces I did find enjoyable.

I cannot believe they are going to publish the other two years of this journal as a book, though. I know art is subjective, and I do realize that she was ahead of her time in being able to take "selfies" with a Polaroid.

I love the idea of this book, to see how the face, emotions, and environment change during a lifetime. Sadly I got disappointed when I opened it up and read it. The opening chapters were quite interesting. They made me curious about the book, as they should. But they also had a sense of stile.

The book contains selfies, and that's about is. Sure, that was in the title, so it should be a dead giveaway, but I hoped on more contexts in the pictures. Maybe some background, different face expressions, or even different clothes. Just seeing pictures of the same selfie all the time gets a little bit boring.

My Polaroid Selfies is book 1 of a series of 3 books of photos taken by Melinda Camber Porter of herself. She took roughly 1 picture of herself a week for 3 years. She was into selfies before selfies was even a thing. This photo's were taken in the early 80's with a Polaroid Camera.

Melinda became enamored with the Polaroid Camera and being able to get almost instant feedback from the pictures she took. This was new thing back in the 80's. She basically wanted to see if you could read her thoughts from the expressions on her face in each picture.

Also in the book you get the behind the scenes story of the Polaroid Camera. The camera took Edwin Land over 50 years to produce and market the cameras. Before dying a slow death with the invention of digital camera's. Now with this book it brings back memories of these amazing camera's.

Melinda passed away in 2008 but has left her work in art, journalism, and literature, and this is book 1 of the publisher's way or sharing with us.

Fascinating study. The artist Melinda Camber Porter took a series of polaroid self portraits in 1981. These selfies before selfies were a thing are interesting to see. I thought the presentation (both individually, as on the page as found in the artist's binder and then in series) made the study even more interesting. Also, the artist's notes as to the thoughts in her head as a shot was taken leads me to feel that she was trying to capture looks in her work (what WAS on the mind of the Mona Lisa, after all). My favorite was selfie #34, which reminds me so much of a view of a face in a Renaissance painting. Highly recommended for artists and admirers of art.

I do love the idea of this book, the first of three volumes of 'selfies' taken by Melinda Camber Porter on her polaroid cameras in the 1980s. She was fascinated by the way in which you could get instant feedback from a polaroid camera and not wait some time before developing the pictures, and this lead to her keeping a collection of selfies, taken roughly once a week, spanning three years.

I found the introduction / foreword really interesting, with some information about the development of polaroid cameras, as well as why Melinda was so interested in taking these photos. We are also told that within the folder Melinda kept these photos, she wrote various annotated statements which summarised how he was feeling at the time, such as 'I am depressed' and 'I am happy'. Reading this, I had expected that we would be given some of these insights, so I was disappointed to see that the photos were simply stand alone, with no textual context given. I was also surprised to see that there were not one, but FOUR copies of each selfie, which really seemed unnecessary. There was also a lot of white space around each picture - they could have been enlarged and given the reader a clearer view, as well as filling the space more effectively.

In short, I really love this concept but felt that so much more could be done with it. Instead of three volumes with each picture being duplicated four times, the whole lot could have been put into the one book. I had also expected that the pictures would have had more visual context, rather than just face-on selfies, which after a while gets a little boring. I am undecided on whether this book, hence the three stars.

A fascinating book with interesting selfies. As someone who loves polaroids, I enjoyed reading/looking at this book