Striking many poses.

Self-portraits have become a kind of fork art for the digital age, especially among young people. Framing themselves at arm's length, teenagers snap their own pictures and pass the camera to friends at school, e-mail the images, or upload them to the Internet. Amber Davidson, 19, a freshman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., says she puts a tot of time and thought into the serf-portraits she posts online. "I don't want people to think I'm sitting there taking all these pictures of myself," she says, "even though I kind of am." With the increasing availability of cheap, lightweight digital cameras, striking a pose and sharing it with the world seems to come naturally. But inexpensive cameras atone can't explain the trend. "In 1960, a person just wouldn't take a Kodak Brownie picture of themselves," says Guy Stricherz, author of the book Americans in Kodachrome 1945-65. "It would have been considered too serf-aggrandizing." To psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, the poses and role-playing in many serf-portraits found online are "a form of pretend; the adolescent version of children dressing up."