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I started pointing the camera at myself when I was very young. Partly because I was the subject closest at hand, but also because I was exploring identity through image making.
I doubt I would have decided to follow a creative career, had it not been for a course on “sex and sexuality in contemporary art” I took while at uni – and more importantly the support of Rune Gade, who was teaching the course. Until I met Rune, I had kept my self-portraits more or less secret.
In June 2008, when I had just joined artreview.com, critic Laura McLean-Ferris wrote a bit about my work in relation to anonymity in Roundup #10:
“…interestingly, much of the work explores portraiture as a representational trap, and many of her images of women in particular are fragmentary images of body parts, such as legs and stomachs.
The figures here seem caught in a bind, unable to represent themselves through image-making. The viewer, the photographer and the subject are all part of a process of refusal and small resistance.”
I like this in relation to the self portraits, since to some extend the viewer, photographer and the subject are one and the same, and still there is the same process of resistance going on.
I think the self-portrait genre is considered a little embarrassing and improper, there is a certain vulnerability about it, putting yourself out there at the risk of everybody regarding you as a narcissistic exhibitionist. However ourselves and our mortal coil ought to be one of the subjects we know best. I think it is a question of daring to be honest.
The self-portrait above was shortlisted for the BJP International Photography Award, single image category & exhibited at Vision 09.
When I was pregnant I photographed myself and my growing belly every few weeks. The images were uploaded to my Flickr diary. We jokingly called the resulting series The Architecture of Art, making the connection between two different kinds of creation; the construction of a child (Arthur, my son) and the much less wondrous making of an image.
I find the human shape and the changes it goes through very fascinating, after all our minds are bound to it, as is our feelings. If you think about it, that is really very hard to relate to or comprehend. When I photograph I think I’m trying to capture a glimpse of what goes on behind the skin, the combination of feeling and flesh, or somehow translate the bodily experience.
When looking at last years prize winners for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I came across this image, by Hendrik Kerstens. I really like how he’s made the plastic bag look like a sculpture. It’s so simple, but a very strong image that kept popping up in my mind since I saw it. The girl in the photographs is Kerstens daughter.
“Hendrik Kerstens was born in 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands. Winner of the 2001 Dutch Panl Award Kerstens is a self-taught photographer who initially turned to a model close at hand, his daughter Paula. Since starting to photograph Paula in 1995 Kersten’s work has been exhibited in over 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. In his portraits Paula is always depicted as being austere, serene and illuminated with a characteristic ‘dutch’ light. In September he will open his first solo New York exhibition at the Witzenhausen Gallery. Kersten’s short-listed portrait was conceived in New York when he noticed the excessive amount of plastic bags given away in shops. As a humorous reaction to this environmental problem he photographed the plastic bag in the style of a seventeenth century cap.”
Every day Flak Photo features a new photo, which shows up on my Facebook Home page. Today it was this image by Susan Worsham. There’s some really interesting, odd and inspiring work on her website.
“SOME FOX TRAILS IN VIRGINIA
This series of photographs is taken in and around Virginia, the place in which I grew up. The title comes from a book written by my father’s ancestor, to show the lineage of the Fox family in Virginia. For my own purpose, it acts as a metaphorical map, of the rediscovered paths of my childhood home.
At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father’s old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.”
I first became aware of Joel Sternfeld when he was shortlisted for The Citigroup Photography Prize at The Photographers Gallery in London, in 2004. They were showing some very odd travel sceneries, like this one of an exhausted renegade elephant, from June 1979.
Later I went and got Stranger Passing signed by Sternfeld.. I felt so nervous as I was waiting in line, when I finally got there, I managed to tell him, that I wanted to copy him. He wrote in my book: “To Alex, with all good wishes for your photography. Picasso said, “I never borrow – I steal.”
“Joel Sternfeld, (b. 1944, New York City), is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important fine-art color photographers in the world, noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and establishing color photorgaphy as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York and the Getty in Los Angeles. He has also “raised” and influenced an entire generation of color photographers including Andreas Gursky who borrows many of Sternfeld’s techniques and approaches.
Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College and teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He began taking color photographs in 1970 after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Color is an important element of his photographs.
Another book, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (1997), is about violence in America. Sternfeld photographed sites of recent tragedies. Next to each photograph is text about the events that happened at that location. From 1991-1994 Sternfeld worked with Melinda Hunt to document New York City’s public cemetery on Hart Island [1]. A book, “Hart Island” was published in 1998 [2]. Sternfeld has also published books about social class and stereotypes in America (Stranger Passing [2001]), an abandoned elevated railway in New York (Walking the High Line [2002]), and a book titled Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America ([2006]). A new book containing close-up portraits of delegates debating global warming at an United Nations conference in Montreal, titled When It Changed, is currently slated for publication in July 2007.”
This short film about photographer Stephen Shore is part of the reason I decided to start a blog, even though I’m years behind, the blog is dead and long live the micro-blog. You should watch the film if you have any interest in photography. It was made by Jay Cornelius & Donna Golden/ Docere Digital Studios.
“Stephen Shore (born 1947 in New York City) is an American photographer known for his deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.
Stephen Shore was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six. He began to use a 35mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans’s book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. His career began at the early age of fourteen, when he made the precocious move of presenting his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recognizing Shore’s talent, Steichen bought three of his works. At age seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol’s studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
