Week 3

So this week our topic was on self portrayal. We were given a reading called “On self-portrayal” by R. Duncan Wallace. It was very interesting and certainly important for me to start figuring out certain aspects of why I create self-portraits and why they have become so important to me. As part of the assignment we had to write our thoughts as to whether the art of creating self-portraits have affected our own awareness. My response was the following:

I believe that it has. I think that the more self-portraits I create the more pieces I begin to understand about myself. Be it new forms of expression, or lacking parts of my identity I have yet to come across. The reading “Self-Portrayal” by R. Duncan Wallace was very interesting and certainly correlates to many of the ideas I believe to be behind the art of creating a self-portrait. One of which believe to be true is that a self-portrait is “much more than a simple narcissistic exercise.” Personally, as a photographer and an artist, I have succumbed to self-portraiture not because I am obsessed with myself, but because I feel like I do not know myself well enough, and how can you understand your environment if you don’t understand yourself first? And having worked with self-portraits for a year now, I am sure that my self awareness has changed and evolved, and in some cases, just like the reading said: “when you make more than one self-portrait through a period of time you have other reference points to relate to. You can compare and contrast. You can see the actual growth which you have accumulated by contrasting the two photographic records.” And I believe this to be so true for me. Especially in the way I have chosen to shoot/represent them. I have felt that the more I am aware of who I am and what I want to say, my process or medium has shifted. I believe that I am more self-aware of my authentic identity and there for moved on to what I feel is a more authentic process such as using polaroid instant film and film cameras… This really has been a change from digital, and I cannot begin to describe how satisfactory it is to be able to shoot a self-portrait without the intention of manipulating it later. Also, as the reading suggests, “old self-portraits take on new meaning at later times in life,” and this is exactly what has happened to my work. Older self-portraits that I had digitally composited with the intention of suggesting a world’s view I thought I had, now just seem like they are not at all who I was at the time or who I am now. So at that point in time, my self-awareness was different from the one now, and the one now will eventually become obtuse too. So, “the levels of awareness of the self accumulated from life experience are inferred in the self-portrait” and hence why you can over come these with time as your experiences have changed.

After reading the article and writing my response, I began to wonder what was important for me to say in this assignment. Because I feel like I am still figuring out who I am, and evolving with my awareness, I decided to continue using my Polaroid camera for an “authentic” narrative whilst playing around wit my own identity, which actually mimics the thought process I undertake whenever I think of a self-portraiture project I want to initiate.

Because I believe I still haven’t quite figured out who I am, I needed to recreate this feeling on camera, and I decided to use double exposures as a means to reveal and obstruct certain parts of the images, almost like a puzzle, where pieces are missing but can eventually be filled in.

I decided to call this small series: PIECES OF ME

I decided to use different wigs so I could explore different personas I could possibly be. Not because I feel like I want to be someone else, but because I believe I am still not sure of who I am, and in many ways I can come to be whoever I would like to be. After doing these images, I decided to scan them in, and when I did, I decided I should combine them all in Photoshop to even further the idea of many different awareness’s and identities in one. After I was done, I was not happy with the medium it was at, and with my Polaroid shot the screen of my computer. This is what they ended up looking like:

In the end I believe that these two images were quite successful in exploring the mixed feelings I have about myself, and the uncertainty of who I am, or even of who I might come to be. It would be a very interesting project to pursue if I had more time and was not freaking out about my thesis.