Millennials, the first generation to grow up in the Internet age, are expected to take more than 25,00 selfies in their lifetime – about one a day.
According to The Guardian, The pictures tagged #selfie began appearing on Flickr in 2004 and went viral with the iPhone 4's front-facing camera in 2010.
This phenomenon drew the attention of the photographer Switzerland Cristina Rizzi Guelfi, who decided to play, quite artistically, with the obsession widespread by selfies.
These, according to the artist, have become a very powerful storytelling tool that give people the opportunity to show themselves to the world exactly as they want to be seen.
Rizzi Guelfi discovered photography by chance after earning a master's degree in Film Directing. Since then, this self-taught artist has been building a strange and fascinating visual universe, inhabited by a multitude of different characters.
In said worlds, la witty artist replaces subjects' faces with archival American photos from the 50s and '60s.
The resulting shots are both real and fantastic, raising the question: how much can we really extract from an image?
In an age of digital tinkering and filters, it can be hard to tell truth from fiction. Through a vintage aesthetic, Cristina Rizzi Guelfi shows a mirror of the unreality of what we could see on social networks in a quite original way.
According to the artist, the responsibility for this compulsion should not be attributed to smartphones, but to social networks.
It is worth noting that the artistic work of this photographer is peppered with humor, nostalgia and a lot of satire. It's a series of images upon images, which makes it just great.
