2019 Self Portraiture Project
An on-going photography project, starting February 1st 2019
exploring the use of selfies as modern self portraiture.
Some notes
I took photography during my A Levels, and while I enjoyed it, I did not 'technically' do well,
leaving college with a grade D. There I found out about and wrote an essay on the photography of Francesca Woodman and fell in love with her work. While much of her work goes unexplained,
it is technically interesting, beautiful, and self exploration. The artist uses herself as the focus of
or as a prop in many of her pictures.
After college, I did not do 'photography' but still loved to take pictures.
Much of my work focuses on myself and helps me to process and navigate the world, and I had been thinking of started a personal photography project. My favourite forms of photography are portraiture, self portraiture, nude photography, and photos simply of and about humanity.
What is it about?
I hate the notion that my generation is self obsessed, but am also very aware of the problems
that being so focused on appearance and the use of social media has on people my age today.
I hate the word 'selfie', and while I do not think
of myself as someone especially beautiful,
I love to take them.
I like to work alone and no one else will be able to understand exactly what I want better than myself,
so I am the best and easiest model I could find.
We accept self portraiture as an art form, but mock selfies as a concept, and I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to blur those lines
Taking photos of myself allows for self exploration,
to see how comfortable I am and how far I am
willing to go to take a picture.
This project also acts as a way of documenting myself on any given day and moment, how artistic I want to be in a day and how open I want to be.
I take the pictures with my phone, because with the advances in technology today, you can create
some interesting pieces of art and photography
just by an app.
(Also my camera broke and
new camera's are expensive)
I post these daily on my
personal social media accounts.