The larger than life-size, amber toned image of the German artist Joseph Beuys appears to be marching out of the gallery, striding forward towards us. In a hand written note at his feet, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (1972) grandly decrees, “We are the revolution.”

Joseph Beuys, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi, 1972.

The distorted owl-like countenance of a woman holding her head up with a hand and with her mouth twisting wryly gives us Berenice Abbott’s Portrait of the Author as a Young Woman (1930, printed circa 1951). It is a puzzling and numinous portrayal of a spectral animal within.

Berenice Abbott, Portrait of the Author as a Young Woman, 1930, printed circa 1951. Gelatin silver print. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

The small black and white image of a man perennially suspended, frozen in space, as he leaps out from a wall over the street below records Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960, printed 1980) a gelatin silver print that marks off an era. A bucolic panorama populated by the same woman in the same attire in different poses digitally explores the multiplication tables for self-manifestation in Lisa Anne Auerbach’s Take this Knitting Machine and Shove It (2009).

Anne Collier, Mirror Ball, 2004. Dye coupler print. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

The implicit question arises of the exhibition’s title is how the selfie is different, if it is, from the fine art genre of photographic self-portraiture? The answer is nuanced and may differ for individual viewers, but overall that issue is sidestepped by the quality of the 65 images that these artists have fashioned to reflect on their sense of self, or contest a sense of self, or even perform a re-definition of self—images that range from early nineteenth-century traditional photo-based experiments right through to contemporary digital compositions.

Chino Otsuka, 1976+2005, Kamakura, Japan, 2005. Dye coupler print. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of the Irmas Family Foundation.

One strand that emerges throughout is that these exhibited self-portraits all appear to have a larger historical backdrop as an essential part of their ideation and realization. Unlike the momentary and mercurial appearance of a selfie where the goal is a widespread albeit lighting-like consumption of a self-image in this or that company or place, the more meditated and decanted examples of self-representation of these photos work off of a much slower time scale and with the declared intent to merge the personal with the epochal.

Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns), 2001. Dye diffusion thermal transfer print. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, February 22 – June 3, 2018, at Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design, 1700 Lida Ave, Pasadena, CA 91103. www.artcenter.edu