This weekend, Sandra and Sandy from Gogglebox (you know, the women from Brixton, one of them who drinks her drinks out of a Pot Noodle) were in attendance at Clapham’s Calling Festival. While there, they attracted a load of attention, and, The Mirror reports, they were happily posing for selfies with their fans. That was, when they coughed up £1 per selfie for the privilege.
They’re not the only ones to have charged people for selfies. One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson has been offering selfies up for £250, with proceeds going towards Doncaster Rovers Football Club, the club he bought earlier this year (makes you beg the question why he, with all his millions, can’t just contribute directly to the club).
And it’s making us wonder about the ethics behind this. People wouldn’t sell their own autographs back in the pre-digital camera day, would they? It was up to scheming autograph hunters to sell them on. But now, celebrities are cajoled into selfies all the time, and now that their fans can sell them on really easily to websites and news agencies and papers and the likes, maybe it’s fair for them to want a cut of it. Like, if you've got a selfie and in your selfie is Harry Styles, making out with you, you could probably make a decent whack out of the picture alone.
Plus, £1 isn’t that much to charge for a selfie, considering how much kudos people will get from their mates when it’s found they’ve been hanging out with a star. But isn’t a tad odd that this creates an actual economy for faces?
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised… the most famous selfie of them all – the Oscar selfie, containing celebrities including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence, Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o, Meryl Streep and, um, Channing Tatum – was, of course, a thinly-veiled advert for the Samsung Galaxy phone Ellen DeGeneres was using to take the photo.
The lesson learned? If you want to charge for it, probably best not to pose for that selfie. Plus, who wants that much change jangling around in their pockets at a festival?
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.