Week 7

This week we had to read the article “Self-portrait/no face” from Training your Gaze. The article was very interesting and def. changed my perspective on how I saw a self-portrait to be. I had a few ideas I wanted to do for this, a self-portrait with no face, but after the reading I realized how important a face actually is for identity.

Some questions proposed in the article were things like “why would you photograph only some parts of your body?” , “what would this inform to your viewer?” , “could you want to do this because you don’t want your emotions to be visible on your face?”… There were many questions I was making to myself and figured out that in my self-portraits facial expressions have always been very important and that’s what I rely on to convey the message. So, what if I got rid of that?

I decided that I would create anonymous selfies for this assignment. The whole idea of a selfie is to show the online society what you were doing or how you looked in one particular moment in your life. If you omit the face from this idea, you get a whole new interpretation. So I took selfies in which I then deleted my face from. It was interesting that in any of these occasions I tried to make myself look pretty for the photograph, and obviously that was an unnecessary step because I knew I would be deleting the face from it. So the state of mind of each selfie became as much part of the image as the absence of the face. These were the images I created:

Connie also wanted us to create a self-portrait of the back of our heads so I came up with this: