n the early 21st century, front-facing smartphone cameras transformed visual culture, sparking a surge of interest in self-portraits. While widely studied, these images are rarely examined through the lens of human–animal relations. My dissertation began with a focus on self-portraits in art and social media, but I soon became more intrigued by the non-human animals that peek into the images from the margins and resist human intentions than by questions of human identity. This article-based dissertation analyses how human relations with non-human animals are depicted, negotiated, and questioned in self-portrayals. I ask how non-human and human embodied agencies as well as multispecies interactions and encounters are constituted in photographic self-representations of the early 2000s.

Theoretically, this dissertation engages with posthumanism, posthuman feminism and new materialism all of which challenge the position of humans as subjects and agents in contrast to nature as a passive resource and the object of human actions. The methodological inspiration is drawn from new materialist ways of following art which seek to encounter rather than to interpret visual culture. Through embodied and affective engagement with the material, I explore co-becomings and relationality, guided by a commitment to imagining less violent multispecies futures.

The research material of this dissertation comprises both photographic artistic self-portraits and selfies posted on social media. This selection opens up various perspectives on human–animal relations: “selfies” taken by Naruto the macaque monkey invite reflections on the status of the animal within social media and other forms of visual culture; photographs of the artist Elina Brotherus and Marcello the dog provide insights into multispecies families and non-human agency; seagulls appear in human Instagram selfies either as friends or flying vermin and make visible the ambivalence with which humans, particularly in the West, approach non-human animals, while the artist Iiu Susiraja poses with cuts of meat, bringing to the forefront questions about the objectification and dehumanization of human and non-human bodies.

In each of the four articles that make up this dissertation, I approach agency as relational and not exclusive to humans, examining how the selected photographs challenge anthropocentric power dynamics through agency, the gaze and the act of looking back. The analysis also highlights the noteworthy similarities between human and non-human corporeal agencies. Drawing on posthuman ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, this dissertation challenges the clear-cut distinction between the Western human subject and the non-human world and emphasizes multispecies entanglements. The non-human animals in my research material, often described as “cute”, behave in unruly ways that resist the compositional control imposed upon them by the human photographer, thereby challenging human exceptionalism and dominance. To conclude, I suggest that in addition to visualising ambivalence and illuminating speciesist hierarchies and asymmetrical human–animal power relations, visual culture has the possibility to foster less hierarchical ways of co-existing with non-human animals, encouraging more empathetic and ethical relations in our wounded world of ecological crises.