AbstractsSociology

Iconolatria is a thesis in three parts that uses portraiture to draw parallels between contemporary practices of self-representation, particularly on social media, and historical religious worship through images, particularly in Christianity. The portrait is used as a site for the confluence of contradictions and ironies that occur when an individual becomes responsible for her own representation. Using the visual language of medieval and Renaissance multipanel altarpieces, the paintings of Caravaggio and mass-produced Catholic stampitas, and cross-pollinating these with photographic trends linked to representation of an individual on the Internet, Iconolatria questions contemporary attitudes towards the Self by setting them against the traditional worship narrative of the Church. This paper makes three main assertions: that visual conventions in images historically signifying sanctification have retained traces of their heredity in contemporary self-representation specifically through the language of “making strange,” that the authority of the Catholic Church is paralleled by the institution of the Self in assigning esteem and disclosing narratives, and that the existence of the self and the negotiation of identity in digital realms necessarily coincides with self-sanctification. Keywords: self-representation, social media, sacred images, prayer cards, altarpieces, Caravaggio, self-portrait, social photograph, sanctification