We live in the age of the selfie. Everybody can do it, and everybody does. It is hardly, however, the “examined life”. James Hall’s cultural history examines a different kind of looking at our selves, that of the professional visual narrator of both the inner and the outer life. These images are not snatched in a microsecond, but are the result of prolonged scrutiny: amplified, recorded, interpreted, imagined. Hall’s absorbing study shows us through a discussion of picture-making over the centuries the myriad ways in which artists whose business it is to craft images for the public gaze – and their own – have turned their expertise on themselves. The conventional assumption is that the importance of the individual in Western visual culture, leading to t