New York-based advertising and fine art photographer Mike Mellia is behind a fun Instagram series called “A Selfie a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.” In this subtly awesome series, Mellia strikes a still pose and then animates just one part of his body, usually his arms or his hands. Whether he’s twirling campy eyeglasses or swirling a glass of wine, the photographer looks absolutely serious in his endeavors.
One of my favorites is the one where a dapperly dressed Mellia takes a cigarette out of a box and then proceeds to, nonchalantly, flick it onto the ground. His brilliant caption? “That one time I was an ad man.”
When he’s not creating fun video loops of himself, Mellia works as an advertising photographer. With clients such as Vogue, Harry Winston, and Christie’s, he certainly has his hands full.
We caught up the photographer to ask him a few quick questions.
What made you want to start this fun series?
The cliche about Instagram is that it’s mainly for self-obsessed people taking selfies, so I wanted to have an ironic account of my own with only selfies. Like many Instagram accounts, the mood of the selfies oscillate between unbridled megalomania and mundane nonchalance.
What do you hope others get out of it?
It’s a personal project that I enjoy doing, so I’m hoping people can have fun with it and laugh along with me. Ironically, my commercial work is often inspired by composition or the styling of these outlandish selfies, but done in a very mainstream aesthetic.
How do you come up with your ideas?
I think it’s an obsession to try to keep pushing the selfie series further, and with a lot of people making art, this obsession to keep going is something they can’t control. I have a notebook that I keep coming back to, writing down ideas about styling, composition, the captions, etc, at all strange times and sometimes in the middle of the night. Chuck Close the painter said that the more you work the more you will find creative ideas and I think that’s very accurate.
0 comments