Your Turn in the Spotlight

 

This free article from the Maryland Daily Record changed my life! Okay, that sounds like clickbait. Let’s just say it blew my mind.

Selfie museum offers influencer haven, opens 2nd location in Columbia, Johanna Alonso, Maryland Daily Record

Photo credit: MDR

What on earth is a Selfie Museum? 

Have you ever wondered where influencers go to get their Instagram photos taken — at least, when they’re not partying at Coachella or lounging on the beach? 

These days, the answer is what is sometimes referred to as a “selfie museum,” a relatively new type of business that provides influencers, as well as regular consumers, access to dozens of backdrops for a fee. 

The Spotlight is a new business at the Mall in Columbia that does just that. Whether you’re a genuine influencer, a “micro-influencer”, or a regular, ordinary person, you can strike a pose in a variety of thematic photo-environments.

For a fee, of course. Figuring out how to monetize a current trend is what entrepreneurs do best. In the case of The Spotlight, that entrepreneur is Katoriiae “Tori” Brown-Harding”, born in Baltimore but now living in Pennsylvania. Read the Daily Record article to learn more about her and her business concept.

The Spotlight is a black-owned business. Their website features photographs of Black and Brown models. It would be easy and possibly commercially safer to promote this business in a much “whiter” way and I love that they don’t. All kinds of people love selfies. All kinds of people can be represented.

A few thoughts of the more literal variety: it’s not really a museum as most of us know it. And it certainly isn’t a selfie museum, since it isn’t a museum full of selfies. I guess it’s gmore of a setting for interactive performance art? It reminds me of two things: the fascination with fancy “backgrounds” in school picture packages, and the allure of kids’ “play places” when my children were growing up. 

Maybe it’s the perfect combination of both. It’s a play place with the best photo backgrounds ever.

Of course I worry that places like The Spotlight will bring about the demise of the Free Range Selfie, where the finding of the perfect setting is as much a part of the art as the photo itself. Perhaps we’ll see a great divide emerge between influencers who embrace the selfie museum trend and those who are proud of being selfie purists, finding/devising their own unique settings.

Did I just say all that? What do I know? I don’t even like selfies.

And yet I think it’s fun, and new, and imaginative. I’m curious to see how Columbia/HoCo responds. 

Something that occurs to me, now that I have play places on the brain. DOODLEHATCH has got to be one of the best places ever to take photographs. Just don’t disturb any actual children playing. A photo shoot there would be epic.

Into selfies? Checkout The Spotlight. Curious about DOODLEHATCH? Just go! 

Don’t wait until they actually put all the selfies in a Selfie Museum and charge all the people an arm and a leg just to see ‘em.