Self Portraits

Having read a little from the Train your Gaze book on self portraits and also looking at Friedlander's self portrait work, I decided that I would have a little go myself.  I do believe that it has difficult to judge several things:-

 

you cannot make any myriad of small decisions – about framing

You have lost a degree of control

Because you are not behind the camera, you cannot pre-visualise the resulting image

That means that you may make a picture of yourself that you don’t like

it increases the chances that you will make a picture that you don’t understand

 

When Shirin Neshat looks at herself through a camera , there is a real distance between herself as artist and herself as subject.  This is of course true in the case of all self-portraits.  You are no  longer behind the camera.  You cannot see yourself through the viewfinder, you cannot make any myriad of small decisions – about framing, about choosing the right moment – that make you want to press the shutter-release button.  You have lost a degree of control.  Because you are not behind the camera, you cannot pre-visualise the resulting image.  That means that you may make a picture of yourself that you don’t like.  Along with increasing the chances of accidents, it increases the chances that you will make a picture that you don’t understand.

 

Angier R, 2007, Train your Gaze, Ava Books, Pg 26

 

For this image: I set the camera up for an 8 second exposure and then onto timer.  I then went and sat in the position that I thought best in front of the camera.  I sat for 4 seconds and then quickly moved out of the camera view.  This left behind a faded image (I was trying to have this image so that you couldn’t really see my face)

 

This was an opportunist image.  I was sitting looking at a book on the arm of the sofa, the light from the dinning room was on and shinning through casting my shadow on the lounge door.  I grabbed my camera and took this image.  The harsh shadow along the top is the top of the door where the light was coming from.

 

Again I noticed the natural light coming through the blinds onto the wall.  I quickly grabbed by camera stood in several different positions before I took the following two images.  It was actually the chimney breast wall that is in an 'L' shape, so I think this is the reason behind the blinds not being straight towards the right side of the image and also the way my head shapes round.

 

 

 

  

 

As you can see in the image below I have re-positioned myself to avoid the wall curve.

 

These were purely only trial shots to see what the outcome would be – I do quite like the idea of self portrait and may continue with this to see where it can go.