Better Lives – Blog 3
Throughout my time in the Contemporary Portrait Photography unit, I drastically expanded the way I view portraiture and its limits. As a creative direction student, I am no stranger to photography, however I quickly learned that it reaches depths I had never explored prior to Better Lives. I had always disliked the term “portrait photography” due to connotations of school photos and outdated family paintings. The last thing I expected was to end up exploring its ties with performance art, and creating my own version of performance photography.
As a loyal fan of Cindy Sherman, I was immediately drawn to the ways in which she uses herself as a sort of mannequin to build upon. I have always shied away from using myself in my work, however the current situation pushed me to consider how I might adopt a method similar to Sherman’s to create my final outcome. Her current work is mostly apart of her Instagram feed, comprising of excessively Facetuned and Photoshopped self portraits. As an apparent form of commentary on one’s self constructed identity on social media, I felt that her message aligned with Better Lives and its push to create more awareness between ourselves and our impact with the people and things around us. Because of this, I felt that a self portrait would be the right form of portraiture to work with as a way to emphasize and encourage my own self reflection following the Better Lives lecture series.
When shooting, I almost always use an analog medium. However, I felt that digital mediums would allow me the most flexibility when editing. I photographed myself in several different poses, and in post production, cut out my head and pieced my limbs together in a mismatched position. I then liquified the edges to create a whimsical and unnatural silhouette. I was isolating and shaping my limbs one by one and putting myself back together in the way I felt created the most impact. The editing process was perhaps the time where I reflected the most. I realized how intimate even the most unconventional self portraits could be. Looking back, I am proud of leaving my comfort zone and creating an unexpected but thoughtful self portrait that I felt gave me time for careful self consideration. In the future, I hope to gain some aspect of reflection from every piece of work I create, and to encourage myself to continue analyzing and improving the ways in which I tailor myself to positively impact my surroundings.
Portraiture is such a strong and versatile way to represent oneself or those around them. Visualizing my own self portrait alongside those of my classmates during the online critique, I saw firsthand how deeply our images captured our diversity. Though all of us seemed to be in an almost identical situation, quarantined with few human interactions and limited spaces, each of us were able to engage introspectively in order to create unique reflective work.