It was several years ago when I was flicking through a copy of That’s Life and came across a bizarre little article towards the back of the magazine. There was a teenager called Kurt Coleman who lived on the Gold Coast and was addicted to taking selfies.
He took so many that he might even make the Guinness Book of Records, said the piece – half breathless, half confused. His mum also confessed to being baffled. Her son was taking thousands of pictures a day of his face; it seemed pathological.
This was clearly a child that people were unsure how to respond to: was he for real, really? Or was he trolling us? Kurt was also – even for a Gold Coast resident – suspiciously tanned. He looked like he’d been dipped in brown paint.
I’ve thought of that strange, beautiful child over the years. What had happened to him? Was he still taking thousands of pictures of himself? Or did he, like Narcissus, fall into the river trying to capture a glimpse his own reflection, leaving his iPhone out to dry in the proverbial bowl of white rice grains?
What happened to him was that he had become quite famous: famous for his selfies. Since that article, he’s amassed hundreds of thousands of fans on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, and has his own line of merch (a mirrored phone case, $20, because “no one likes the front camera anyway”).
These days he is a professional selfie-taker.
Before you stop to ponder what sort of horrific, value-neutral world we are living in – a world where someone can become famous for taking thousands of pictures of themselves – please watch Hello Stranger: a new Australian mini-documentary series on the ABC that gives us all another reason to talk about Kurt Coleman. Or at least to talk like Kurt Coleman. (His signature verbal tic is “Killing it”, said after the selfie is consummated.)
Aired on the ABC last month, Hello Stranger is comprised of 10 episodes, each designed to offer “a snapshot of contemporary Australia” and each featuring an in-depth profile on one individual. And now, all episodes are up on the ABC’s iView, featuring The Darkest Spray Tan on the Gold Coast: a profile on old mate Kurt Coleman.
Since his That’s Life profile, the 18-year-old has had fillers on his lips and his jaw. He’s still getting spray-tanned; the darker the better, he reckons. Yet his face remains extraordinarily compelling – beautiful even, an appeal that can be explained in part by his androgyny: he looks like a very hot girl and has this kind of sexual I-want-to-stroke-you gaze every time he looks into the camera (which is, like, hundreds of times a day).
His voice is compelling too, like a weird parody of a parody – part Ja’mie, part Derek Zoolander.
Here’s a sample from the doco, when Kurt talks about his selfies: “That is my talent, my talent is that I’m professional at being myself.”
Or here is another: “Selfie is a good word; it means take your camera out, take a photo – yeah! Then just pose naturally, yeah, you’ve just to show the essence of who you are in one photo.”
Or, one more: “I love photos of myself. It’s like a work of art to me.”
But, as with all good stories, there is darkness there too. Kurt has thousands of followers but doesn’t seem to have many – or any – close friends.
Even his manager, Alex Reid, doesn’t speak warmly of Kurt; he refers to him as an acquired taste.
Reid first found out about Kurt when his friends showed him the Instagram account at the pub.
“I looked at,” said Reid, “and I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’”
The unseen interviewer asks Kurt: “Who are you closest to in your life?”
“Um, myself,” Kurt replies. “Like I literally talk to myself all day.”
At the start of the program is a content warning: “This program contains content that may disturb some viewers.” And at the end is the number for Lifeline. The inclusion baffled me: this wasn’t a show about depression. Was the crisis line there because Kurt’s story would ultimately make us depressed?
Isn’t he just us with the volume turned up?
Killing it.
• The full series of Hello Stranger is available to stream on iView
