It looks like a project is developing over this. Personally I don’t like self-portraits with much of me in them and never have; I don’t know what other people see in them but it definitely isn’t what I do. Perhaps this is a self-perception issue, or maybe even a matter of habit; I’m happy to give it a go but the net is unlikely to collapse under the sheer volume of traffic generated as I release vast numbers of images.
In general, I find the whole thing with portraits a bit like the issue of ‘pictures depicting time’ – sometimes portraits show you the surface of a person, and the way they react to a camera, but it seems to me that the way the portraitee looks fits a pattern, a familiar path through the field of portraiture. Certainly you can get some truly unique and remarkable ones – and I’ve seen some around flickr, and can’t hope to better them – but also you can get ones that seem very focused on the outer message of a person, and I want what’s in them.
Here’s another one. You’ll be surprised to learn that this one isn’t from Flickr, and that isn’t me. Elizabeth I sits with her back to the Armada, seemingly waiting unhurriedly as they meet their doom, contemplating her status and power and looking a great deal better than she did in real life, apparently. According to this link, she ended up getting younger looking as the years went on, neat if you can do it! http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/early_stuart_02_-_jacobean_painting.asp
The clues are all right there – crowns, globes, death and turmoil amongst the fleet, and the opulence of her surroundings, and I love it of course, these are
fantastic artefacts alone, let alone considering the marketing and artistry that went into them. But clearly, it’s political, and subtlety doesnt’ really figure here. It’s like having a man standing there with a placard saying ‘The Queen is alive and well, incredibly well off and ready to defeat your nation if you dare to differ,’. Not much subjectivity to be had.
I’m sure, though I can’t remember it clearly, there used to be a group on Flickr for portraits or self-portraits where the person being regarded wasn’t even in the frame. That’s the kind of thing I’m after I suppose. It doesn’t have to be that extreme, but I want something that shows me the inside of people, a bit more insight in to what they’re experiencing internally, or what they believe. Not all ‘external’ portraits are as extreme as this one of course, but even so, I want to be able to read what it says about the heart of the person, or what they think about while the portrait is being done.
And like the time pictures, there are techniques that spring to mind. Pinholes, lack of focus, contrasting focus, doubles…and particular cameras. Here are a couple I tried much earlier :)
Helpfully in this one I resemble the Grim Reaper, and you can’t tell anything else much about what I’m like from my appearance. You would have to use the clues – unfortunately this was not ’set up’ to be a conscious self-portrait, being too opportunistic to provide real inference, so you might get a bit misled! But if something like that could be done less randomly, it could work.
And in this one, I have taken something of a squashing from the pinhole camera (an oatmeal tin with layers
of black tape). I enjoyed the distortion, and there’s promise there. I would like to look less hungover though, especially as I hadn’t even drunk anything! I like the way my eyebrows are sprouting like forests. But really I like the way pinhole takes you away from direct, surface ‘reality’ of what’s being seen, and leads your eye to what else there is to be found.
