“Considering that an arts career is essentially showing as many people as possible ‘Hey, look at what I made!,’ I have no problem at all with more people joining me in sharing the fruits of their own narcissism,” he writes in his artist’s statement.

That said, viewed on the phones, the black-and-white images challenge the full-color “perfect” selfie that we are accustomed to seeing. And there’s an “Anti-Selfie” of a person’s back that raises a challenge of its own, questioning the nature of the narcissist,

Templeton, however, isn’t content just to impressively redo the selfies on the phones. He connects those images to the past in a mixed media assemblages, one titled “Nero Selfied While Rome Burned."

A second, “An Act of Violence,” uses a photograph of a girl taken by Lewis Hine, the social reformer who documented child labor in the early 20th century, as its subject matter.

In doing so, Templeton addresses the photographic portrait against flattering, self-selected selfie. If the selfie taker doesn’t like the image, it will never be seen. In a portrait, that choice is made by the artist and flattery is rarely the criteria for selection.