The Rise of the 0.5 Selfie
Credit... A grid of 0.5 selfies: Julia Herzig (2); Hannah Kaplon (2); Rebecca Worth (2); Soul Park (2); Alessandro Uribe-Rheinbolt
Julia Herzig, a 22-year-old from Larchmont, N.Y., has “an obsession.” It’s with taking a new kind of selfie — one that doesn’t exactly conform.
In some of these selfies, Ms. Herzig’s forehead bulges across half of the frame. Her eyes are half disks, peering up at something beyond the camera. Her nose juts out. Her mouth is invisible. These images are best when they have “ominous, creepy vibes,” she said.
Ms. Herzig started taking these pictures — called 0.5 selfies (pronounced “point five” selfies, and not “half” selfies) — when she upgraded to an iPhone 12 Pro last year and discovered that its back camera had an ultra-wide-angle lens that could make her and her friends look “distorted and crazy.”
But what seemed like a joke was bigger than Ms. Herzig, a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, thought. A few months ago, after spring break, she opened Instagram to a feed full of 0.5 selfies.
