'Together Alone' is a new series of works by Rashid Rana that deals with the subject of self-gaze while at the same time it also celebrates the notion of “self-love”. This digital montage is assembled from a collection of mirror selfies - a fairly standardized form of self-portraiture in the age of social media - in which the camera, the mirror, the seeing self and the seen self are all visible at once, confusing the distinctions between each.

These images constitute a macro image of a series of self-portraits by Adrien Alban Tournachon, taken in about 1858. Tournachon, the lesser-known brother of the famous Nadar, stands still, balanced against a chair and holding onto a hat in hand. These photographs are a predecessor to Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with describing motion through still frames. Tournachon’s portraits contain a similar desire for movement, as if the camera is mobile and omnipresent, examining his stance from a full 360 degrees. This surrender to the camera connects the earliest moments of mechanical imaging to the contemporary world, where performativity has replaced the formal stiffness and perhaps discomfort of Tournachon.

In this work, the audience is left to construct their own narrative between Tournachon’s portrait/s and thousands of micro constituent images of present-day mirror selfies. The title of the work “Together Alone” refers to the dichotomy of the virtual (apparent) togetherness at a global level in this age of social media and the solitary figures contained in their own individual cells within the larger matrix of selfies.