Auckland Museum wants to immortalise your selfie

Auckland Museum wants to immortalise your selfie in its permanent collection

Monday 2 September 2019

This September Auckland War Memorial Museum plans to collect 1000 selfies to add to its permanent photography collection.

For the month of September anyone can submit a selfie of themselves in Auckland to potentially become a permanent part of the Museum’s image collection.

Auckland Museum Curator of Pictorial Shaun Higgins says this public call out for selfies will help boost the Museum’s collection of current day photographs in Auckland.

“Our collection holds more than three million photographs, dating back to the early days of photography and a part of my role is to ensure our collection continues to reflect trends. The selfie is a present-day photographic phenomenon that can’t be overlooked,” he says.

Higgins and his team will select up to 1000 selfies of people showing ‘their Auckland’ to be immortalised in the Museum’s collection.

“This means a person’s selfie would be preserved and made available online for generations to come,” he says.

As well as being included in the Museum’s collection, a handful of selfies will also be selected to appear in the Museum’s Tāmaki Stories gallery, which opens in 2020, to sit alongside other images of people in Auckland from across time.

Higgins says he is looking for a wide range of selfies.

“We’d like to see photos of people in Auckland, whether that’s on a ferry, up Rangitoto, in front of their favourite fish ‘n chip shop or even in their home, whatever Auckland is to them, we’d like to see it.”

The one requirement is that the image is a selfie.

“This means it’s taken by the person who also features in the photograph, either by holding the camera in their hand or on a selfie stick. We don’t want photos taken by other people or taken on a self-timer,” says Higgins.

People have until 30 September to submit their selfies to https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/selfie

Not all submitted selfies will necessarily be selected to be added to the collection.

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